


The Unfortunate Delusions Of Danielle Mies

by Garmonbozia



Series: The Delusions [2]
Category: Sherlock (TV)
Genre: Gen, dymm
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2015-11-07
Updated: 2015-11-20
Packaged: 2018-04-30 11:19:21
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 15
Words: 35,784
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/5161904
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Garmonbozia/pseuds/Garmonbozia
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>With the scales fresh-fallen from Moran's eyes, Jim's been reconnecting with some other old friends, spreading out the web again.  But there's one, a name that hasn't even been mentioned, one he's left to last.<br/>His one and only and very dearest Angel is not entirely sure it's a good idea.  </p><p>(Following on from The Unfortunate Delusions Of Sebastian Moran)</p>
            </blockquote>





	1. Chapter 1

It itches. I mean, people always tell you about that, it’s the first thing they mention when they talk about having a cast on, but you never really understand until it’s you yourself, it _itches_.  It really, really itches.  I’ve had the same little needle-tip rattling around under the skin just beneath my left elbow for a day and a half now and nothing works.  Nothing touches it.  I tried with a ruler, down from the plaster edge at my shoulder, but I can’t get around the moulded corner.  I shoved the ruler up from my mitt-palm too, but it wasn’t long enough.  The itch just itches.

Mr Moriarty says it probably wouldn’t get any better even if I _could_ scratch it.  One of the breaks is just below my elbow, see?  He says the itch probably isn’t a skin thing that I could just claw off, but is probably down in the mending bone. 

Knowing that I can’t fix it doesn’t make it any easier to put up with. You’d think it would, but it doesn’t.

There are a total of four fractures in my arm. The person who told me so is a proper doctor, or he was until he got struck off anyway but he’s still got all the training and we have made sure he has the necessary equipment to patch up our people when the silly, record-obsessed NHS is out of the question, so I know it’s true.  Both bones are broken at the wrist, which is why I’m stuck in the shape of those long crooked Tetris pieces I could never do anything with, immobilised so they’ll knit up straight.  There’s a smaller crack in one bone about halfway up my forearm, a little split that might have needed pinned if I’d seen a more professional professional.  And the chip, just beneath my elbow, where a tiny fragment of bone broke off under the stress.  Doctor cut me open and pulled it out with tweezers.  It looked like one of those little nuggets of broken glass you see in the car parks of cheap boozers.  Those really hurt when they grind around under your skin too, so it wasn’t the only similarity.

Which is why the boss has gone for his _own_ shopping, and I am watching Jeremy Kyle with McLeod.  And I _do not_ feel guilty.  I refuse to.  Even though I should absolutely be doing everything for him that I can, and he was gone for so long, and has been so kind since he came back, even when I didn’t deserve it.  I’m not guilty about this. 

He sent me to get _Morgan_ , for fuck’s sake.

If you don’t know who Angus Morgan is, you could probably still pick him out of a crowd. Mostly because he towers above it, closer to seven feet than six, and he’s about half of that across the chest.  He’s almost bald, because he’s had so many scars and stitches to his head that any hair grows in weird ginger tufts, like a doll some little madam has taken the scissors too.  And he is, though I know this is a cruel thing to say, not the swiftest cheetah on the Serengeti.  And Mr Moriarty sent me – little me, five-foot-barely, me that never puts on any weight I don’t immediately work off running around for _him_ – to tell this big stupid man that the former boss, who he really really loved by the way, the boss he thought was dead, was alive and wanted him back in London. 

It was never exactly going to go well, was it? Morgan wanted to look me in the eye, see?  That would help him decide if I had gone mad or, worse, if I was lying.  But rather than lean down and look, he decided I’d have to come up to his level.  He picked me up, with one hand I’ll have you know, by the left wrist and brought me right up, eye to eye.  And when he put me down again I couldn’t wave to flag the taxi.

He’s back, though. I made sure of that.  Even though he hurt me; I wasn’t there about Morgan.  I was there for my boss, who had trusted me to do this deeply important thing, and I made sure it got done.  He appreciated that.  He was very kind when I came home with my arm wrapped up between two splints, poorly tied because Mr Morgan had to help me.  Mr Moriarty got me straight to the doctor, and he stayed with me.  Nicer, in fact, more worried about me, than I’ve maybe ever seen him.

“Bones mend how they’re set.” He told me that a few times.  He said if you let bones be bound crooked, they’d never be straight again. 

That’s the other reason I don’t feel guilty. Me, ripping the wrapper off a Twix with my good hand, two of the unplastered fingertips of the other and the other end of the biscuit tucked in the cat’s collar, I’m watching daytime television with a clear conscience.  Because he’s allowing it.  Mr Moriarty made it okay when he was so concerned about it all.  He hasn’t _asked_ me to do anything, so I don’t feel bad for doing nothing.

It’s a little strange, though. I mean, bones do heal, that’s the point he kept making.  In my opinion, this cast is not the worst thing that’s happened to me since he started gathering his favourite friends again. 

Right after we made sure of my Colonel, for instance, he asked me to go and visit Penny Corcoran. Not to tell her he was back, not to mention him, not to try and re-recruit her or anything.  Just to visit, he said.  Social call.  “Go and see if Poison Penny remembers you.”

I always liked Auntie Penny. I think it was because she liked me.  She never questioned where I was from, or what my real name was.  She never told me I was ill, or that Mr Moriarty made me that way like _some_ I could mention.  Even if she had, I wouldn’t have understood.  She’s from Cork, which is the part of Ireland with the thickest accents, and may or may not be called what it is because everybody sounds like they’ve got a mouthful of corks.  It’s probably not.  That’s just what I say to be funny.

Anyway, the very kindest thing Penny can do when you go to her house is allow _you_ to make the tea.  Because of the business she’s in, you understand.  Because a lot of people, even the ones who really love her and work with her all the time, wouldn’t trust Penny to make the tea.  Whenever it’s her turn to buy dinner, it’s always a restaurant night.  She takes no offence, and smiles, and spitfires a half-second’s worth of syllables that might be ‘occupational hazard’.

Penny let me make the tea. She put out the china, but that was all.  And she poured the milk into mine, but I saw her taking the seal off the bottle, so I knew that was okay.  She was kind.  We chatted for hours.  And then I started getting tired, and I made my excuses to leave.  Then I went to stand up, and the world bounced.  Like I’d stood onto a trampoline, my vision, my brain inside my skull, it bounced, and Penny had her mobile out calling an ambulance, and that was when I realized that I’d been very stupid.

It wasn’t in the tea. It was in the teacup.  She explained it to me while we sat side-by-side on the front step waiting for the paramedics.  She painted the inside of the teacup with it, and the china absorbed, and she painted again, and the same over and over. 

The last thing she said to me, concentrating on her best and clearest words as the flashing lights came round the corner, “When you go home, _if_ you get home, tell him to fuck off.” 

And _in my opinion_ – but let’s face it, I drank out of the cup Penny Corcoran put in front of me, how smart could my opinions be? – that night in hospital and thinking I would probably die was the worst thing that happened since Mr Moriarty came back.

But he wasn’t worried that time. Angry, actually, that I ended up in a proper hospital, even though I didn’t give them my name and I snuck away as soon as I could walk without help.  He was pissed off about Penny too.  That’s why I made sure, when I saw Morgan, that I got the job done. 

Isn’t it funny how everything’s connected? Like I’m watching Jeremy Kyle and this couple are obviously connected by blood as well as shagging, the DNA results are only going to confirm it.  But me working so hard with Morgan was connected to me failing so miserably with Auntie Penny.  And being so guilty after that is connected to why I’m not at all guilty now.

Mr Moriarty could phrase this better than I can. He can do about everything better than I can.  Look at me now, trying to scratch McLeod’s chin with the fingertips of my broken hand.  He doesn’t like it.  The plaster catches his shaggy old throat. 

Failing to please even the cat is connected me to turning off the television and going through to the office, because it makes me feel like I need to do _something_ useful. 

It’s a bit of a mess of here. With the blinds shut and the lights on in the daytime, it feels stale and sneaky, like a library.  It’s not like the office used to be before he died that time.  That was much more free.  It had echoes in the corners of it, leftover from arguments he’d had about jobs and the best way to do things.  It had other smells, not just him and his coffee, but the Colonel, and perfume, old newspaper, cigarette smoke, pot plants, coconut oil, cheesecake, Chinese, whiskey and vodka and lager.  But there isn’t anybody to argue with or leave smells now.  Though back then the room itself was pristinely neat, now all the arguments are tacked up on the walls and piled up on the desk. 

But it doesn’t _feel_ messy.  I’m not doing a very good job of explaining…

Spider’s legs. The way they move, scuttling, so fast you can only trust that there’s a rhythm, you can’t count it out.  Meticulous, like spider’s legs. 

Shuffling the papers on the desk back into their folders, I wonder awful sad if Mr Moriarty knows – he’s turned into what Holmes called him. Way back at the trial, this is.  He was _so_ miffed with the spider comment, you know.  I was able to visit him while he was in custody.  He was maximum security and MI5 were watching, but I was able to visit.  I think they wanted to see if he’d say anything incriminating to me.  Of course, he didn’t.  In fact, Holmes was all he talked about.  Surprise-surprise; all he _ever_ talked about back then was Holmes.  I’m pretty sure it’s just a matter of time _now_ before he goes back to it.  He’s thinking about his friends at the moment, about who to call back and how to make them come, but once that’s wrapped up, I’m pretty sure…  Anyway, that spider thing really bothered him.  “I mean, I _get_ it, I get the web analogy but… _spider_ , I mean, doesn’t he get it?  Or does he think that’s clever?  Am I supposed to still be thinking about this?”

Heaven help the Vauxhalls that had to listen in on that conversation. All he did was moan and all I did was cry because I couldn’t take him out of there with me.

My plaster elbow knocks the huge card folder with ‘Watsons’ scrawled blue on the front of it, and I’m only just quick enough to trap it all against the desk before it falls. All those loose pages, I’d never gather them all up and get them in order before he gets home.  Twisting, arching my back, crooking my good arm, I get the edge and push it back into place.

It gets bigger every time I see it, this folder, like a little cousin. It’ll be going to secondary school soon.  He came home the other night and said, “Did you know Mary’s expecting?”, like we were all just best friends who hadn’t seen each other in a bit.  I told him it was just a rumour and he came back an hour later with the notes from her last scan.

You see why I’m pretty sure we’re working back to Holmes?

I’m actually surprised it hasn’t been mentioned yet. I wasn’t going to bring it up, but I’ve been surprised for a while.  Every time he opens his mouth, I’m sure that’s what he’s going to say.  It sits on my chest when I’m trying to sleep like a bad cough.  It makes my hands shake if I try to do anything with him in the room.  It’s like being around a bomb just waiting for it to go off.  When it happens, I’ll be fine, but waiting is killing me.  Not knowing why I’m still waiting is _killing_ me…

Desk tidied, I sit down to the computer. I can tidy that too.  Make folders, consolidate different files of notes that are on the same subjects, I can compress and protect and firewall.  He taught me how to do all this because he can’t always be bothered and doesn’t always care.  I care, see?  I take better care of him than he does.  Apparently that’s how dead people work.  They think nothing can hurt them. 

One thing I haven’t done in a while is clear out the keywords on the newsfeed. If he’s working on the Watsons, the only words he really needs to be watching for are probably their names, and Holmes’s, of course, and all the usual bits and pieces. 

I go into the list and find a crop of new terms right at the top.

 _Heist_ , it says. _Theft, robbery, thief, daring, diamond, museum, art theft, millions, country heist_.  It says, _Daniela Artura, Maya Arthur, Maya Darcy, Darcy Mies, Danielle Arthur_. _Danielle Mies_ , it says.

I say, “Bollocks…”


	2. Chapter 2

Days pass.

I listen in case I hear him whistling the Flower Duet. I only watch terrestrial channels, in case the sight of the EPG makes him wonder what channel Sky Arts has moved to.  I make sure I don’t use any bleach when I’m cleaning, and when I almost buy myself a Bounty down the shop, I go back to the shelf and change it for a Topic, because I don’t want to bring home anything that smells of coconut.

He _can’t_ be looking for Miss Mies, he just _can’t_.  For one, he wouldn’t need to.  She still lives in the same flat.  She always bloody has.  She got killed for a few months this one time and she never moved out of that flat, and Mycroft knows she lives there and she doesn’t care.  Mr Moriarty knows exactly where to find her, same as I do. 

For another, he doesn’t _want_ her.  He told me as much. 

He came back from being dead and went to the Colonel immediately, and then very quickly to me. So that’s two people, right?  But back in the days, back before he was dead, there were _three_.  The Colonel, and me, and the Bitch.

So naturally after he got me (he never didn’t have me) and me and him got the Colonel back (which was a little bit more difficult but not much), I assumed Miss Mies would be next.

But you know what happens when you _assume_ , don’t you?

It was the day _right after_ the Colonel started talking to him again, and Mr Moriarty was going out for the day.  He left me some office work to do and he put on his third best jacket.  Best jacket for Holmes, second best for other business.  Third best for impressing friends. 

I laughed and told him she wouldn’t be impressed.

“Who?” and he really didn’t know who I meant, brow furrowed, not even smiling like it was a joke. Really needing to know who I meant. 

“Miss Mies,” I said.

Mr Moriarty shook his head no. No, he said, he was going to see his old bombmaker Mr Shikra.  He had one of his large, elaborate chain reaction plans which, beginning with Mr Shikra, was eventually to drive my dear old Uncle Charlie home from where he’d gone to hide in Florida.  And that was that.  All very simple.  And I sat there smiling to myself as he left, because if he wasn’t going after Miss Mies then, he never would.  She would not be back.  I was free of her.  I thought that day was going to be excellent, because it had begun with such very good news.

Mr Moriarty got as far as the door before he came back and sat down opposite me in the office. I took my hands down off the desk out of sight, and I shifted to sit on my feet, and I made myself very small and harmless and like I never meant to say anything out of line. 

“Angel,” he said, “Listen closely, this is important.”

“Always, sir.”

Here is what I listened to:

“In a while, days or weeks or months, that person you just mentioned is going to come up. But she’s of no use anymore –“ and I started to ask why but he held up a hand and I shut my mouth again, “- and it won’t help.  I don’t need her and I’ll only regret it.  Stop me, Angel, when the time comes.”

Well, I panicked. What else could I do? _Me_ , stop _him_ , when he wanted something?  I can’t even keep him off that third coffee in the morning when I’m supposed to, and I’m the one that makes the coffee. _Me_ , stop _him_ … 

That was always _her_ job. 

Miss Mies talked back. When the plan was stupid or he’d missed something obvious, when he was going to land everybody in prison cells or one of Mycroft’s more permanent boxes, she told him so.  I even heard her _laugh_ at him once or twice, to make her point.  She could stop him.  Not that she didn’t suffer for it; this one time, he even tried to have her killed.  Another time she’d been captured and he was supposed to send the Colonel to help her, and he never did.  That was before my time and I don’t know the details, but you see what I’m getting at.  She was the one who could rein him back, and even then he didn’t like it.

I panicked. Days and days and days, me on high alert, me waiting for any sign of her, me ready to plead and beg and stand in front of the door to keep him here with me.  I thought I could probably do it, if I had to, because I myself absolutely do not want that woman back in our lives.  One of the biggest rows they ever had was when she told him he was wrong to make me.  She said he broke a perfectly ordinary human and made a monster out of the pieces.  She said he should have gotten another cat if he was bored, or if he’d wanted to destroy something she could have gotten him some priceless sculpture out of a Spanish museum.  She even offered him her favourite crowbar, the one with _Nancy_ written on the shaft in cracked and grubby Tippex, to do the smashing with.  Whether she meant the priceless sculpture or my skull was never very clear.  She shouted for hours. 

Mr Moriarty didn’t try to have her killed for that one. I don’t even think he spoke that much during all of it.

This one time, clearing out his contacts, I found the name and number of a person who can get fake obituaries into national newspapers. I thought about it.  Honestly.  Really I did.

But as I said before, days pass. All the fear and hate that swelled up in me when I read her name on his computer starts to die back again. 

And then it happens.

I’m in the kitchen eating. I spent the afternoon at the National Theatre, actually, in a backstage dressing room with Lola Montez, reminding her who she owes her career to.  I had fun.  I’ve had a nice day, except for the Tube ride back, where I was crushed up against a woman who had absolutely drenched herself in Chanel Number 5, which is one of the smells I didn’t want to bring home with me.  I made myself late circling our building, faster and faster on my skates until the fresh air had taken every trace of perfume off me.  Aside from that, a nice day.

I should never have nice days. I jinx everything when I have nice days.  They make me complacent.

Mr Moriarty was in the office when I got back, and I must never disturb him if I can help it. Now he comes to find me, calling, “Beth?”

“In here.”

I don’t think he’s been out of the office all day. He stands leaning the doorway with yesterday’s t-shirt and yesterday’s stubble on.  Sometimes I worry, you know.  I’ve seen him like this before, obviously, at home and comfortable.  Nobody else ever did, but I was allowed.  It just seems like it’s all the time, these days.

“You’ve been gone hours, Millie,” just the slightest edge of danger on the words, just a very slight possibility that this could end badly for me. “Where do we stand with our Lola?”

Hanging over my Pot Noodle, trapped on one end of a noodle that never seems to stop, I can only give him a thumbs-up.

All the danger goes off him. “Oh, excellent!  Have to say, I wasn’t sure about sending you to do the talking on that one.  Well done, Angel.”

I can’t tell you how proud I get. You’d probably guess if you saw my face, all beaming and red, but you can’t, and I can’t put it words so… So just imagine, right?  Imagine it’s like you’re very little, in primary school, and a really horrible teacher who hates everybody tells you you passed the test and no one else did.  Imagine that and you’re probably getting there.  I thank him as soon as my mouth isn’t full. 

Then Mr Moriarty opens the freezer. I don’t know why but my heart stops.  “What are you looking for?” I say.  I’ll be able to find it faster.  He doesn’t need to go rooting around in there. 

“Dessert. You and me both deserve something nice.”

“Give me a minute, I’ll run down to the Italian place.”

“Sit,” he snaps, and from half out of my chair I get half back into it, sitting on the edge, my hands pressed between my knees, my head down. “Jesus, you’re awful excitable…”, so I make myself take deep breaths and sit very still. 

Don’t ask me why, but my eyes are closed like it’s all over.

He reaches right to the back where the frost is thick, trying to pull something out of the white. Mumbling, “The fuck is that?” and “Feels like glass.”  Because it’s frozen glass, eventually it sticks to his hand, leaving a little raw graze where it pulls off the pad beneath his fingers.  And all I can do is sit here while he gets fascinated, with that item might be frozen in the back.  All I can do is sit here while he balls up a handful of tea towel and reaches in again.  With a proper grip on something this time, he starts to pull.  “Stop,” I say, “Don’t.”  But the crackle of the ice drowns me out.

It’s a bottle of vodka. I suppose I already knew that, deep down.  You keep it in the freezer because the alcohol content means it doesn’t actually turn to ice. 

“Don’t,” I say again. This time he doesn’t hear because he’s laughing.

I bought it. I could throw myself out a fucking window for that.  I wasn’t thinking.  The first time I shopped for this apartment, stocking it better than he had, I was shopping like it was the old days.  I bought it for _her_ , for her late-night martinis and her early morning Bloody Marys.  I put it in the freezer and forgot about it and let the frost bury it.  I did this.  This was me.  I should be fucking shot.

“And the seal not even broke,” he’s smiling. “Now I’m not one to believe in signs and wonders, my Angel, but-“

“Don’t,” I say, louder this time.

But he’s still laughing. Putting the bottle back and, now that he’s not stuck to anything else, grabbing a tub of ice cream out before he shuts the door.  He gets two spoons on the way to the table. 

“Really,” I try again, “it’s stupid to think it’s an omen of anything except that I’m really bad at shopping. It’s my fault.  It’s got nothing to do with… anybody else.”

“Say her name, a chuisle.”

“No. And you shouldn’t either.  You’re supposed to have forgotten.”

“Oh, not that. _Never_ that.” 

Now he is thinking about it. I can watch it behind his eyes.  It’s a soft light.  It anticipates trouble and overcoming it and fun had doing so and ultimately success.  Aside from the Colonel, he’s had quite an easy time getting his friends back.  Even Poison Penny came around.  She was able to appreciate the value of a friend like Mr Moriarty when her little sister back in Ireland went missing.  The police over there searched for weeks.  We were able to tell her right away who had her, where they were keeping her, and who she ought to kill.  So she’s friends again now.  I believe that, right now, Mr Moriarty is thinking it might be really exciting to go after Miss Mies, like she might make him properly chase and fight.  I believe he thinks he’s ready for that. 

“Not tonight,” he begins, “because you’ve done more than enough for today, but first think in the morning, Angel-“

“Please don’t,” I mumble, but I don’t think he hears it.

“I want you to go out and find her for me. Don’t approach her, don’t talk, just find her.  Keep track for a bit.  See what she’s doing with herself, how she’s putting the hours in.  Reconnaissance, as your Colonel would call it, nothing strenu-  You’re shaking that pretty head of yours, dear.  Why would you be doing that?”

He leans back in his chair so he can get his hand into his pocket. He could have anything in there.  He’s been in the office all day.  Paperclips, elastic bands, staples, safety pins, recently he’s discovered what can be done with the little plastic splinters he keeps biting off his pens, so I begin to explain myself as quickly and politely as I can, “Thing is, you told me back in the beginning this would happen, and I’m supposed to stop you.  I’m supposed to tell you you don’t need or trust her and you’ll absolutely regret it?”

He stops reaching, leaves his pocket alone. I know by his expression, he’d forgotten that conversation.  He remembers it now and he’s not going to punish me for bringing it up.  Still, he leans in, a little closer than before, and makes sure I am fully aware, “Not for one second have I ever _dreamt_ you could stop me doing anything.”

“I know that. But that’s what you said.”

He nods. He knows he said it.  Which is an improvement on some other things that have happened in the past, so I am able to brave a moment’s eye contact.  And he doesn’t slap me, so I let my eyes stay up.  “Yeah, there was a reason I said that.  But I can’t remember for the _life_ of me what it would have been.  So, first thing in the morning-“

“Please don’t.”

“- You’ll go and find Miss Mies for me. Please.”

“But you told me not to, so am I going to suffer because I’m letting you even though you’re now telling me different?”

He’s not even thinking of me. He’s eating ice cream and he’s still inside his head.  He’s thinking of _her_ , and all her weaknesses, what he can use, how easy or hard it will be.  He is _daydreaming_ , loving it, completely lost and all I can do is sit in front of him and try not to cry.  Try not to scream and run away when he smiles, “Best hope I don’t remember that reason.”

One last try to break through to him, “You told to tell you it would end really badly.”

“So will this conversation if you make me ask you, a third time, to go out first thing and-“

If he finishes that sentence, he’ll have asked again, and I’ll be in trouble. “Okay,” I snap, so fast.  And Mr Moriarty nods, smiling like a saint, being very appreciative, that I have not entirely forgotten how to play the game.   


	3. Chapter 3

I do make a good spy, you know.

Even Uncle Charlie used to say so, and Uncle Charlie hated me. I think it’s because Uncle Charlie is in the business of reading people and of understanding what they want without them having to speak, and he never understood me, even though I’m probably really simple actually, because all I am is me and all I want is to be my very best Angel self on behalf of Mr Moriarty but…  How did I get onto…  Oh yeah.  Even Milverton used to say I made a good spy.

It’s because I vanish, see? Invisible me, celestial I existing on a whole other plane to low, animal-type people like Miss Mies.  Yes, I have left my skates at home, because I get recognized by the rush of the wheels, and I’ve got my plaster arm bundled up inside my coat out of sight, I’ve got my hood and collar up and my scarf wrapped tight to my chin, but all that is just the material stuff.  Most excellent, most Angel-me, I vanish inside it all.  The street swallows me up.  I used to live there, see.  The street still knows me, and it swallows me back whenever it can.

My day begins early, because hers does. Miss Mies lives in a little mews off a green square, where I make myself small on a bench and watch the front of her building.  It’s six in the morning.  Either I’ll be able to watch her leave for a morning run, or – and this is what happens, even as I dream it – a cab will pull up and she, in last night’s mess and make-up, will get out and stumble up to the doorstep.  Probably still pissed, never mind hanging, and God knows what bed she just rolled out of. 

Let me tell you, while she’s inside making herself look worthwhile again, that’s her idea of a perfect morning. She’s like a pig in shit right now, I don’t even have to ask her.  Though I’m too far away to see, I know she was smiling all over her face.  Those are her favourite hobbies, aside from stealing; sex, drinking, fuck knows what else, and being completely shameless about it.  I think it’s because she’s posh.  People with lots of money are always shameless.

But I think today must be a work day for her. Something elaborate, something with a scam built into the heist, because when she leaves the house again, she’s still stumbling.  It’s got nothing to do with martinis anymore, though; it’s part of an act.  I know because she’s in costume.

Miss Mies, who was never less than pristine and the snow had to be three feet deep before she’d put her legs away, is wearing a long skirt. It’s still beautiful and expensive, but it’s long. Her cleavage is out though, because she obviously can’t help herself and had to compensate.  She’s wearing a long sweeping coat with a neckline that cuts in from the shoulders so even that doesn’t hide the swell of it.  Speaking of which, she’s put a bit of weight on since I last saw her.  Starting to get that arse she was always moaning about but… How’d I get onto this?  Oh, costume.  Yeah, a big, elaborate costume, and the part that really gives her away is the main prop.  She’s got a walking stick.  Again, because it’s her and she’s posh, it’s black and polished and probably antique, but it’s still ridiculous.  It’s the stupidest looking thing I’ve ever seen, and even as I’m getting up and looking about for a cab so I can follow her, I almost want to laugh.  Honestly, how I can describe it… You’ve never seen anybody so clever get it so wrong before.

The limp’s good, though, we’ll give her that.

A car comes for her. It might actually be the same one that dropped her off, which is a bit interesting but not enough to worry about.  I get a cab to follow it.  Turns into a very expensive cab too, halfway across town, where Miss Mies and her driver have breakfast in a tiny little place where you probably need reservations for breakfast near Regent’s Park.  I actually find a Rice Krispie from _my_ breakfast stuck to my jumper cuff and feed it to a pigeon while I moon about waiting.

Spying is a lot of waiting. You never see this in James Bond.  He never has to wait.  Even if he’s going to shoot somebody from a rooftop, he just walks right up in the right moment and he assembles his gun on the way and the whole thing takes about twelve seconds, which is complete bollocks.  I know because the Colonel told me.  He, unlike James Bond, is real, and really has shot people from rooftops, and you lie there for days sometimes waiting for a perfect shot.  Real shooting and spying and being a clever sneak, that involves a lot of waiting. 

There is a short walk after breakfast, with her keeping up her impressive limp, and carrying the cane because she’s got Wheely McDriveface to lean on. Just a street away, one of those swooping white arcs of pillared fronts, a beautiful big terraced palace.  Miss Mies is the one who fishes the key out of her handbag.  It doesn’t look like Drivey’s scene at all.

This is new. The place in Camden is very well known, and if she’s still returning there before dawn, like the vampire she is, that’s still home.  There’s a loft full of practice equipment that I know about, there’s two storage lockers, there’s her old family home up the country, but this place is new.  I make my phone give me the address and text it to Mr Moriarty.  While I’m at it I give him the reg of the car.  From that, maybe he’ll be able to find out who Lightning McQueen is really. 

Me, waiting, going from one street to another so as not to look loitery, I get the awful idea, _maybe he’s a kept man_ …  You know what I mean, don’t you?  Like... like a male mistress.  Not a master, that’s different.  You know what I mean.  He gets to live in the palace and drive the Lexus and eat the expensive eggy bread, and in return he’s her cab and helps with the cons and, like, polishes her lockpicks (not a euphemism) and then he polishes lockpicks (absolutely a euphemism).  Back before everybody was dead and I lost track of her, she rarely slept with the same one twice, but what if she found one she liked?  What if she decided this is what she wants to spend her money on?  Some people buy golf clubs or go diving.  Is this her hobby?

And I’m stuck with this disgusting image for _hours_ , wondering if I should try and get any closer to that house, looping past it and around the back, looking for alarms on the gates, for twitchy neighbours that would see me looking in the front window…

I could just walk up and knock, you know. She’d probably even be pleased to see me.  She always could push a smile on when she needed to.  All bright and breezy, _Oh, Angel, it’s been ever so long since I’ve seen you, do come in for brunch_.  Wouldn’t be a bad idea, that.  Maybe Kit can cook as well as negotiate London traffic.

But Mr Moriarty told me not to, didn’t he? Just reconnaissance, he said.  Follow and learn and report.  Even now he’s congratulating me on the reg and address.  Maybe he doesn’t know what they mean yet, but he trusts them because they’ve come from me and he knows I wouldn’t give him anything useless.  He trusts that later I’ll be able to explain all this that I’ve seen already this morning.  Of course he’s so clever it’s probably enough.  I’ll go home late tonight and he’ll know more than me. 

Please, blessed mother and the boy Jesus, _please_ let him have some reasonable explanation for Mock Ryan Gosling….

But before I can get too wound up again about the whore’s man-whore, I’m coming back onto the right street and a cab has pulled up. There’s such a delightfully rich hush around here that, over the chugging of the exhaust, I can hear our Driver’s voice as he helps poor, _crippled_ Miss Mies down the front steps.  He says, “Are you sure about this?”

“Positive,” she replies. It’s the first time I’ve heard her voice in years.  It sounds different to how I remember.  Tired.  Then again, I did see her get home this morning.  “No better way to protect myself.” 

They must be discussing her scam, and how far she’s taking it if she’s going to insist on limping about when it’s just the two of them. She’s being method.  How diva.  How not-surprising. 

Then they’re at the curb. He says, “So two, for lunch?”

“Mmh. I’ll try to be out on Cromwell Road, but you might have to come in and get me.  I’ll probably be with that shoe exhibit again, but ask the staff, most of them know me.”

Oh, that means I don’t have to run away and scrabble for a taxi. I can take my time, I can take the Tube, because I know exactly where she’s going.  Cromwell Road.  Exhibits.  Might have to come in and get her.  Miss Mies is off to the museum.  Recreationally, apparently.  Not for anything, certainly not for work.  Just to fill a couple of hours until lunch.  Driver says he can stay with her, if she likes, and she tells him he’s terribly sweet but she’ll be fine. 

I walk away, my head tucked down in case her cab passes me, and I fish for my phone and call home.

“Morning, Moneypenny,” says Mr Moriarty, and I can’t help but smile. I don’t want to, but I’m grinning all over my face.

“Don’t make me laugh,” I mumble.

“Oh, of course, you’re trying to go unnoticed. Good work with that house, though; has she moved there?”

“I’m not completely sure about that, because she's definitely still got the Camden place. She’s actually just left it.  That’s why I called, actually.  It’s all wrong, I wanted to ask in case you understood it because I don’t.” 

I stop, waiting for the traffic lights and an answer.

After a pause, and suddenly much less impressed with me, “What’s the _one_ thing you didn’t tell me in that gabble?”

“Oh. Well, what I’m worried about, sir, is that Miss Mies is going to the Victoria and Albert Museum, and no one is forcing her to, and she couldn’t be casing anything because she already seems to have a job on, so do you know what that would mean, at all?”

This time there is _far too much_ of a pause on the far end of the line.  “Nothing.”  The word is very short and clipped and small.  So is Mr Moriarty’s voice.  A stab of guilt goes through me even though I don’t know what I could possibly have done when I’m only reporting in like I was told to.  “There must be something she wants to see.  There’s a gold altar façade there she gets very excited about, maybe she’s visiting that.”

“She did say something about shoes, actually.”

“See? You, my dear, are getting all caught up.  Sometimes a pen is just a pen, as not enough people said to Freud.  Now, don’t you have stalking to get on with?”

Yes, obviously I do. And obviously, he’s right.  I am actually _too good_ at being a spy, and therefore am expecting everybody else all around me to be a spy, and getting paranoid, and seeing things where there aren’t things.  I probably shouldn’t even follow Miss Mies, I should go back to the white-front house, get my cast out again, pretend to fall over and crack it.  Mr Gearstick inside would have to be a decent human and come to help me.  I’d meet him and find out who he is and what he’s doing there and what it’s all about. 

But Miss Mies… In a _museum_ … Without a gun in her back…

Mr Moriarty says it’s okay so I suppose it’s okay. But I just have to see it.  I have to make sure for myself.


	4. Chapter 4

Miss Mies suffers from a condition – which I am not allowed to laugh at – which is called Stendhal Syndrome. Anybody who knows her knows this.  Pretty things affect her very deeply.  Posh music and art and stuff.  Don’t get me wrong, I’m not a total troll – I like to look at paintings in galleries.  I’m even getting a little bit smart about composition and artistic decisions and symbolism and stuff because of people like Uncle Charlie and Miss Mies.  But this is a totally different thing.  She goes away.  She can sit in front of a landscape for hours like she was tiptoeing through the tulips herself.  She got removed from the Louvre for sobbing too loudly because Helen of Troy was getting raped larger than lifesize.

Shut up; I said I'm not allowed to laugh.

It’s just a rumour, but I heard a story once that Holmes had knocked her out with his violin. And says me, “What, you mean he clocked her with it?” and says the Colonel, “No, that was another time.”

I _told_ you to shut up.

You understand, don’t you, why I just _had_ to see her walking around a museum alone?  Nobody along with her to snap her out of it or pull her away if she gets embarrassing, no apparent reason she’d _have_ to be here.  She never even liked to go _stealing_ out of big proper museums.

But here we are. She is limping and stumbling up ramps while I linger on stairwells.  She starts to crouch to look at the snake sculpted on Eurydice’s ankle and can’t do it.  Following behind, I do it for her.  It’s a bit crap actually; it’s a pointed head-shape on the end of a squiggle and doesn’t look much like a real snake at all.  Pretty marble, though. 

I follow her through different halls. On a gallery up above one, though I can’t see how to get to it, there’s the gold altar front Mr Moriarty mentioned.  I think, if she’s going there, how very clever I would be as a stalker to go first and wait near it, to be ahead and not behind.  Because it’s not like her, y’know, not to sense somebody behind.  But she deliberately dips her head, shielding her eyes with her free hand, and rushes forward until she’s beneath it and can’t see a thing.  Obviously that’s not what she wants to get caught up in.

While her hand is up, I see the iPod held in it. For the first time in a while, I’m not looking to see where she might go, but at her. 

I think there must be something very beautiful coming out of her earphones; she sits down at the next bench, so abruptly I almost walk right into her. I’ve got no choice but to keep going, right past, right in front of her eyes.  I let my steps carry me on, expecting her to call me, to have to pretend I don’t hear, to have to turn a corner and vanish.  I’m going to have to go home, aren’t I?  Go home and tell him I got caught and can’t do proper reconnaissance.  She’s going to get me killed, I swear.

But nothing happens.

I stop at a statue, like I’m any other drifting student, and I study it a little, so I can walk around it and look back down the hall at her. She’ll be looking right at me.  She’ll be laughing because I pretended to look at a statue.  This is so stupid.  I’m going to leave all this out when I report back to Mr Moriarty. 

But she’s not looking.

Never noticed me, apparently. Her eyes are down, at her own knee, and she is pressing it hard with the heel of her hand.  She’s getting it all wrong.  Believe me, I’ve been in pain, and she’s a parody.  I really did think she was a better actress.  Mr Moriarty used to give her acting jobs all the time and he never seemed to be unhappy with her.  Maybe he should give them to me, because I could do ‘sore leg’ way better than this. 

But something dark moves at the corner of my eye. I turn towards it and can’t pick anything strange out of the crowd, no eyes on me, no one looking pointedly into any mirrored surfaces either.  But I definitely saw something.  That’s when I realize, Miss Mies isn’t putting her show on for me.  She probably _has_ felt me following, but she’s expecting somebody, so she’s not looking.  Somebody to do with her scam she’s got going is _supposed_ to be here.  She’s so sure she’s being watched she can’t tell it’s specifically me.  Whoever is already so sure she’s got a limp is supposed to see her having difficulty with it. 

Immediately I move further around the statue, looking over everyone I can see, out onto the gallery that opens opposite me. Miss Mies can be seen from there, because there’s a place where the wall opens up and shows her off just perfect.  And where the wall picks up again is blocking my vision of anybody who might be looking.  I’m a bit jealous, actually – _I_ should be standing there.

I’m so busy trying to see who the other stalker is I’ve half-forgotten Miss Mies, not that she’s going anymore. She’s straightened up from her overacting, but she’s only just reaching for the cane again, just thinking about getting up.  One of the attendants in his dark, comfy jumper steps in close to her and asks if she’s alright.  I don’t actually hear him say it.  He’s got that respectful hush on his voice, like you’re supposed to in posh museums.  But I know it’s the question he asks because Miss Mies _does not_ have the hush on and answers, “I’ll be fine in just a second.” 

In here, it’s like shouting. She probably does it for the benefit of me and any other stalker, but it makes her sound stupid.  Even the attendant, and he must see all sorts, looks at her like she’s got some sort of mental problem and softly steps away. 

It’s those earphones, you know. She has come to a place like this and she is listening to something like that.  Maybe it helps her pretend to be in pain.  And it softens her up, so she doesn’t notice she’s overacting.  That makes sense, doesn’t it, when you know about her condition?  Does it?

I don’t understand any of this, you know. I used to really _get_ her.  I _hated_ her, but I got her. 

Anyway, she pushes herself awkwardly back to her feet and starts shuffling off again. I dart back in the shadow of the statue, and it takes me far enough away to see that same shapeless shadow disappearing off the other end of the gallery.

The other, it seems, can do what I only dreamt of, and move ahead of the quarry.

I follow her closer than before, because she’s not paying me any attention anyway, and I can try to see past, to see what’s leading her. I know it’s stupid but I get scared.  Not of any of the usual things, like failing or suffering for it, but of how strange it all is, like I don’t know who’s actually following, like I’m in the middle of something I’m not supposed to be.

She’s getting a headache now. It always happens.  Whenever she wouldn’t tell him something, Mr Moriarty used to play her Satie recordings until she fainted or threw up.  Those were the times I wasn’t allowed to laugh but I don’t want to laugh today.

It’s not much later, and up some more ramps and stairs, when she stops again. She sits herself down again, this time in front of a painting.  It’s huge, all of a wall.  Something out of Rome or the Bible or something, a dark, horrible hall all pillars and stone, crammed full of people.  There’s one in the middle who is sitting on the floor in a painful position, all bends and angles like yoga. 

Oh I get it. It’s the Bible.  It’s the one where Jesus gets the legless fella up and walking.

Miss Mies seems to be looking mostly at a fat naked angel in the front.   And the bench lets her sit close, so I stand back as if I am looking at the same thing.  Somehow I’ve gone from following her to standing guard; waiting for the darker stalker to show themselves.  I get so wound up in it my heart jumps up my throat at the next footstep.  But it’s only attendant, another jumper.  Like the last, he skips me and goes to her.  It’s the cane, you know, it’ll get you all sorts of attention.  Like the last, he leans in close and says something I can hardly hear.

This time, however, she nods, and this one sits down next to her. Carefully, gently, without even turning his head, he reaches up and long forefinger crooks to pull the earphone out on that side. 

Not very professional, is it?

It’s the hand I recognize you know. His walk was different, and the shape of him.  “No,” but I’m talking to myself, under my breath.  I’m already starting to close the distance between me and them.  “Miss Mies, no!”

She can’t hear me. She’s beyond help, inside a painting where she could barely nod when he spoke to her.  But I’m out here, I’m alive. 

That supposed-attendant, that big lanky fake in his stupid jumper, he shifts round, he gives me this look like he’s laughing and says, “You know, I couldn’t tell if you were following or you just had no taste in art.” Miss Mies giggles far too loud for the echoing room.  And me, I’m just staring, eye to eye for the first time, with Holmes.  Actual Holmes, not even Mycroft, the proper Holmes, the one I’m not supposed to meet, and never really wanted to, and he’s laughing at me.  I tug Miss Mies’ shoulder, not wanting to say another word to him.  Shaking her does nothing, so I get around in front of her, crouching down where I’ll be in her eyeline. 

She blinks, very long and slow like a cow. Then tips her head, questioning herself, like she’s imagining me.

“Angel…”

“Yeah, it’s me. Now look who’s on your left.  It’s not safe, we have to go, okay?”  She swings her head to see him, still grinning like a fucking idiot even though he’s absolutely rumbled and anything he thought he’d get out of her he’s obviously not getting anymore.  But Miss Mies mumbles, “No-no-no, I asked him here…  I’m supposed to be-“, nodding past me at the painting on the wall, “ _out of it_ , thank you…”

I don’t understand. I don’t get any of this.  All I can feel is awful, because I have to go back and tell all this to Mr Moriarty, and I think maybe he might actually proper kill her this time.  Before I can ask her to explain, I feel Holmes’ sharp, piggy eyes running me over.  “Oh, so _this_ is the fabled Angel.”  Don’t like the way he says that.  Don’t like that he knows about me.  Don’t like that I’m made out of stories for him. 

I grab for Miss Mies’ hand. I miss.  My hand finds what ought to be her knee instead.  Under the weight of her skirt, I feel metal warmth, sharp lines, a rounded hinge edge, rough strap, and past all that something that gives like flesh but is the wrong shape and twists the way a knee should not. 

The suddenness and reality of it, I choke on my words, but only for a moment.  “I don’t want to talk anymore in front of _him_.”

“Nor should you,” she concurs brightly. “He’s a bastard.”  Holmes laughs.  “Sad fact is, my dear Angel, though I’d love to catch up with you, I _need_ to catch up with the aforementioned bastard.  You, however, should meet me.  Elsewhere.  Later, when I can escape and he’s not following me.”

“You’re very honoured,” Holmes tells me. I get the feeling he’s really talking to Miss Mies.  I hate people who do that, it makes me feel like a little girl.  “You only started this morning.  It took me a week of following to get a meeting.”

“I had to know he was serious,” she tells me, doing the same thing. “But you’re always serious, aren’t you, love?”  She passes me her phone and tells me to check the number she’s got for me.  She says she’ll text me a time and place, and that it will be today. 

And then she picks up her cane, and uses it to pin down Holmes’ foot. So he can’t follow me.  And she is totally lucid, one hundred percent here in the room, when she meets my eye and tells me I should run along.

 

 


	5. Chapter 5

“You’re not _listening_ ,” I cry, following Mr Moriarty from the office to the living room.  Not listening, not even looking at me, walking away like he can avoid me when it’s just the two of us in the flat, “Her _leg_ ,” I say again, because he ignored me last time, “It wasn’t fake, it wasn’t for a scam.  It’s real.  It hurts and it’s all twisted and it’s got a brace on it.”

Suddenly, I’m getting through because he spins, snaps, “You saw it?”

“I touched it by accident, it was under her clothes.  But it _was_ real.”

“I know that,” he says.  Soft and gentle like I’ll get hysterical if I think he doesn’t believe me.  Which I absolutely won’t, I promise, I just don’t like when he asks me to report and then he ignores me, I can’t deal with mixed signals, I get angry when I’m confused.  It’s not so bad when he’s confused too, though.  For instance, now, I don’t think he knows why he came into this room.  Maybe just to get out of the office, past me in the door, trying to leave me behind.  Now he stands lost for just a second, before flopping down on the sofa like he can’t stand up.  _Not you too_ , I think, but keep my mouth shut.

Like we used to before he died, and don’t very often anymore, I sit down by his feet and rest my head against his knee.  When I think about that, about legs and knees and stranger things, I flinch.  But his hand comes down and won’t let me pull away, curls around my face like I was the cat.  Like I was the cat, I press against it.  “Has she text you where yet?”

“No, sir.  But she did have lunch plans.”

“Mmh, with young _Samuel_.”  So that’s Driver’s name.  Probably Sam rather than Samuel, but Mr Moriarty probably knows that.  He just doesn’t like these other people that his friends keep finding.  The Colonel’s husband, Tom, he can’t even mention him by name.  If forced, he looks quite as if he wants to rinse his mouth out afterward.  “I don’t suppose you’d rather talk about him, would you, Amy?”

“We should talk about whatever you want.  But if I’m going to see Miss Mies again-“

“-You should probably know.”  This time I really do flinch, so hard it startles him, and he releases me.  I sit back just enough to look up at him.  He never agrees with me.  I think it’s a matter of principle more often than it’s me being stupid.  I do not make suggestions, I do not expect answers, I do not call shots, so anything I might put forward generally has to get shot down somehow so that I remember that.  But this one, this time, he smiles all wry and knowing-all-of-this-that’s-in-my-head, “Leona, dear, it’s basic good practice to know the enemy’s weaknesses.”

“Is she the enemy?  Is it because of Holmes?”

“No…  No, we’ll get to the bottom of that soon enough, probably.  I only mean until she comes home.  Until she’s with us-“

“She’s against us.  Right, got it.  Sorry.”

“Not at all.  Now rest your head again and I’ll tell you a story.”  I miss the next part, in the rustle of my hair and the moment of moving.  But I think he says, “I ought to tell it to somebody, I suppose.” 

He doesn’t start right away, though.  I suppose we have to get comfortable again.  Or maybe I shouldn’t have brought Holmes back up and his thoughts have gone off on a tangent and I’m forgotten, just a comforting thing to keep his hand busy.  He uses me sometimes to stop himself reaching for his phone, see?  It’s really very flattering, that my ponytail is more compelling to him than the sort of messages he gets. 

Just as I breathe in, about to lift my voice and gently press, he draws in too.  “The first thing you need to know, the only thing you and her might fight over if you don’t hear it from me…  You know how you knew all the time I was alive?”

“Yes, sir.  Thank you, sir.  I tried not to let you down.”

“And you didn’t.  I knew you wouldn’t, that was why I let you be in on it.”

“Thank you, sir.”

“You’re very welcome.  I made no such decision with our Dani.  She was meant to be as deep in the dark as your Colonel and your Uncle Charlie and even our sainted Sherlock.”  _Meant to be_.  I hear those words and I hear all the promises off them and my slow steady breathing starts to speed up, because _I_ was the one, he picked _me_ to carry the knowing, he called me the London Office, and sometimes Moneypenny.  How could she?  How dare she?  “I don’t even think she really _did_ know anything at first, she just didn’t completely believe, and the doubt must have been enough.  Angel, I can feel you getting awful angry down there.  You shouldn’t, y’know.”

That’s not him being nice, that’s a threat, so I make a concerted effort to relax my shoulders, to hold my breath until spots burst in front of my eyes. 

I don’t know why he told me that.  It never would have come up in conversation between me and her, because the only thing me and her are going to converse about is her coming home.  It better have a _lot_ to do with the story about her leg, because otherwise I don’t know why he told me that.

Both of us jump when my phone bleeps.  Mr Moriarty sticks out his hand even as I’m reaching for it, so I pass it directly to him.  He reads my new message with appreciation, with a new little smile, figuring something out behind his eyes.  Then he takes out his own phone and starts to work at the problem, and I get to see what Miss Mies said.  As it turns out, what made him smile, what he’s got his brain grinding over, is the fact that the message is in some kind of code.  I shall produce it so you can see for yourself. 

_Myself and the man who gave you your strangest name will meet you San Francisco, 1958, at the first possible opportunity._

I say, “She did _look_ like she’d been drinking when I first saw her today…”  Mr Moriarty laughs a little.  The same breathy, thoughtless noise that Holmes’ laugh was.  I wonder if he knows that.  It doesn’t seem like the sort of thing I ought to tell him.  But anyway, he tells me to think.  He says I could probably get this one, if I was having a very good day and a decent wifi connection.  “Do you want me to go in the office and try or can you just tell me?”

“What’s your strangest name?”

“Angus calls me Hen.”

“That’s a Scottish pet name, he’s not actually comparing you to a chicken.”

“Oh.  Then…  Then our name.”  Odd.  That makes sense, doesn’t it, when Odd literally means strange?  He calls me Odd sometimes.  It’s short for Odbody, which he calls me very often.  It’s the name of an angel in a film I haven’t actually seen.  “But you gave me that.  And you didn’t know where she wanted to meet until just now, so-“

“That’s not the giving she means.  She means where you got it from, originally.  She means films, I think.  1958’s the year, so _It’s A Wonderful Life_ is out…  But if you follow James… Oh, the clever bitch, _James_ Stewart, oh, I could strangle her.  Yeah, bingo-“ And he shows me his phone, a cinema listings page too small and far away for me to properly read, but I look at it like I can.  “James Stewart, 1958, Vertigo, screening at BFI Southbank tonight as part of a short Hitchcock season.”

“That’s very clever, sir…”  He shrugs, as if to say it was nothing, and sits back already booking me a ticket, but I didn’t mean it as a compliment.  Not as an insult either, that’s not what I’m saying, but I didn’t say it to be nice.  It’s just a thought that was bouncing around my head so much it eventually bounced out my mouth, and even that hasn’t gotten rid of it, and it’s still bouncing, waiting for me to figure out why, to say something smarter myself. 

He could tell me the rest of the leg story while I work on it.

I open my mouth to ask for it, and he fills the air for me, “Go and put your nice jeans on; you smell like the city.  Think back on that day Uncle Charlie picked you up from Goldsmiths and you decided you were a film student.”

There is no room for argument anywhere around those sentences.  They were not questions, but direct orders. 

 

**

 

By the time I’d changed my clothes, he was already off to get the car out of the garage round the corner.  ‘The first possible opportunity’ is an evening showing that starts in just over an hour.  Thinking of traffic and him not wanting to be around, or at least not to be seen, we had to go.  I thought he might tell me more of what he’d started to on the drive down here, but he never.  He told me, in fact, that if I could possibly stay to see the whole film I ought to, firstly because it’s very good and secondly because it will look very good to Miss Mies if I’m more willing to endure her company than I used to be. 

“Sir?  She said at the museum she’d escape Holmes before she got here.  But what if...?”

“Didn’t I tell you not to worry about him?  I don’t think that little rendezvous was quite what you think it was.  Or what he probably thought it was.”  I suppose he sees me in the mirror, me staring all confused and lost, because I don’t know what he thinks I thought it was or what Holmes thought it was, but it sounds like- “You’re so easily shocked, Hannah, it’s adorable.  All I mean is, it’s coming up on three years now.  She’s supposed to have come to her senses.  Seen the light.”

“You mean he thought she’d turn on you?”

“Yes.”

“And you don’t think she did?”

“You think I’d let you walk up to her, all by yourself, defenceless, if she was likely to turn traitor?”

“…Thank you, sir,” but if he really believes that I really wish he hadn’t brought any of this up in the first place, because now I can’t stop thinking about it.  Miss Mies is a dangerous person.  She’s not stable.  And she tends to get in bed – euphemism _and_ not a euphemism – with whoever is most useful to her at the time.  Mr Moriarty’s being awfully trusting, or is that just me?  He told me once there’s a difference between trusting and knowing. 

See, the Colonel had held a gun to his head.  And Mr Moriarty just let him.  And I stayed out of it, obviously I did, but afterward I had to ask, and that was what he told me; that trusting Colonel Moran hadn’t the slightest to do with it.  _Knowing_ he wouldn’t pull the trigger, that’s what was most powerful. 

I think, if I’ve figured this out right, I am supposed to trust what he knows.  I don’t think I have to trust Miss Mies at all.

But walking up to that huge big building, all on my own around the glass tube end with my booking number written on my palm getting muddled with sweat, I can’t make myself believe that.  He should have just come with me.  I don’t even want her.  He’s the one that wants her.  He should come and get her himself.  He can talk to her better than I can.  I don’t even know what he wants her for.  The leg thing is _real_ ; she obviously can’t thieve or fuck for him anymore, can she?  And she can’t scare anybody anymore, who’s scared of somebody that can’t even chase them if they run?  I’ll tell her to come back, and she’ll ask me why, and I won’t have anything to tell her.

I get _hair_ -close to calling him and telling him I can’t do this.

By then, though, I’m in the lobby.  Funny, isn’t it, that once you’re actually inside the building, it’s like the doors slam behind you, and it feels like it’s too late to give up and leave…

I look for her, in case I can get this over with quickly.  But I’m supposed to see the film, aren’t I?  He told me to  And he told me not to be seen or talk to her this morning and I did all of that so I suppose I’d better get it right tonight.  I wait around until the very last moment, though, still watching for her, before I realize she must have been here all along.

They are dimming the lights by the time I rush inside.  I find Miss Mies by the long, sharp-edged reflection on her cane. 

The first thing she does is hug me.  Without even a word, sudden and crushing, just wraps her arms round me and pulls me in.  Not that I like admitting it, given I know what she is and where those arms have probably been – just because she couldn’t be relied on to screw professionally anymore I don’t think she’s any less of an enthusiastic amateur, do you? – but it’s actually quite nice.  I actually don’t want her to let go.  Obviously she does, though, holding me out and away.  She looks down at the cast on my arm.  It must have been pressed right in against her ribs, but I can only feel the plaster.  Miss Mies whispers, “What happened to you?”

By the furrow of her brow I know I have to say fast, “It wasn’t the boss.”

I know by the purse of her lips she doesn’t believe me.  “Well, there’ll be a time to worry about that.  Tonight, we’ve got other concerns, don’t we?”

Do we? 

The film is just starting.  It lights us up in blue.  Because the man behind is getting a bit miffed with us talking, and because even the start of the credits is making her eyelids flutter, Miss Mies sinks low in her seat, leaning to me across the arm.  “Now, I can do it but you’ll have to come tonight.”

“Do what?”

“Get you out, Angel.  I think so, anyway.  There are no guarantees with Jim, but-“

“No!” and the man behind shushes me fiercely so I sink down next to her, just when I want to be as far from her as I possibly can, hissing, “ _Not_ why I’m here!  _Not_ why I came to find you…”

Out?  Me?  She wants to spirit me off somewhere where the Bad Man can’t get me, is that it?  Is that really want she’s saying?  To _me_ , of all people?  Me, who he _told_ , who he made a conscious decision to keep in the loop, that he was going to die and how he would live again?  She’s lost it.  Not just the use of her leg, she’s lost it completely, the use of her brain, she’s out of her fucking mind; _me_ , leave?  This is why the message was so clever, and why I couldn't stop thinking about it.  It was meant to be hidden.  Just me and her, something Mr Moriarty might not look twice at it if he happened to pick up my phone, because it wouldn't make any sense.  I could have pretended it was a joke or a wrong number or anything.  Supposed to be private, because I'm supposed to be this desperate, needy little girl come to beg her for help.  Me _wanting_ to run off, and coming to _her_ for help?  I’d sooner ask a fucking Parliament Square wino who’s been sitting in his own filth for four days for help than ask _her_ for _anything_.  She wants me to come along tonight, no less.  Pack up my troubles in the old kit bag and smile on out of London, out of England maybe. 

Controlling myself as best I can, explaining myself, “You don’t know him anymore.  I can’t just leave him.”

Up on screen the camera whooshes, just in case anybody in the audience didn’t know what a head-rush felt like.  For Miss Mies, with her condition, she feels it completely, and heaves like she might be sick.  Her hand to her mouth, she mumbles from behind it.

She says, “You must be joking.  You know, don’t you?  You must know…”  She’s swaying so I grab her arm and centre her so she can tell me what I _must_ obviously know, which I obviously don’t.  “You won’t survive him this time.  You must know he’ll kill you?”

 


	6. Chapter 6

I put my key in the door as quietly as I can, and deaden the noise of it opening with all of my body.   My shoes are already in my hand.  I set them silently down in the hall.  Closing the door again is a bit of a production, but in the end I do that without making any noise either.  I’m good at being quiet.  Sometimes I have to be.  By which I mean, I will be directly told to be, and to do otherwise would be dangerous to my immediate physical health. 

All I have to do is get to the far end of the landing, to the bathroom.  I can do that.  I can be quiet that far.

But quiet isn’t worth much when Mr Moriarty walks out of the kitchen with his nose down at some papers, walks almost right into me.

“Clara…  Didn’t hear you come in.”

Yeah, that was sort of the point.  “Just a second,” and I keep going, past him, eyes on the bathroom door.  He tells me to stop and suicidal-me pretends I don’t hear him.  “I don’t feel well,” I say.

Just saying it, my stomach starts lifting again.  I’m late back because I had to get off the first bus I caught, I was so sure I was going to chuck up all down the aisle. 

Shouting over the slam of the bathroom door, “How was it, at least?”

Not for me.  I can see why Miss Mies likes it, because of the two-faced girl pretending to be mad over a painting and all the slutty eyes swiping back and forth, and I can see why Mr Moriarty likes it because the detective character has bad luck with high places and loses his mind, but it was complicated and nothing exploded and there was too much lovey-dovey mumbling and this isn’t what he meant, is it?  But the answer I give is the same, both ways, “Not good.”

Just saying it, the retching starts up again.  I think if I’d eaten anything at all since lunchtime I’d be able to do more than just ball up on the floor. 

Auntie Penny told me that throwing up is your body’s way of getting rid of something poisonous.  That makes a lot of sense to me right now.  My stomach is twisting itself in two because it thinks I’ve swallowed something that’s going to kill me.  My insides don’t get it, they just know they feel awful and they’re sore.  But the feeling doesn’t come from bad popcorn or half-done bacon back in the afternoon.  It’s in other organs.  It’s banging the inside of my skull apart trying to get out.  It’s hot and tight in my muscles and it’s shiny and damp on my skin. 

That last, I need to get rid of before I go back out to the boss.  What’s inside me, I can hide.  The outside has to be cleaned up.  Can’t let him see me like this.

He’s still just outside the door.  When I start up the shower he mutters, “Ignorant bitch,” and drifts away.  He’s probably fetching some parcel tape or nail scissors or something else he can use to make me remember what I am.  Except now more than any other day ever he doesn’t actually need to, because Miss Mies already reminded me. 

Just her name, my stomach tries emptying what isn’t there again.

I waited until the film was over.  Because he told me too.  Because I thought afterward I’d be able to talk to her properly.  Maybe there’d been a misunderstanding.  I was being generous and kind.  Something silly, or maybe Holmes, had given her that stupid idea about me wanting to run away, and she was trying to help, like a human would…  You see what I mean by generous.  Anyway, afterward, we would have a drink or something to eat and I would explain and she would get it and we would laugh, oh, what a balls-up!, and she’d say, “Yes, Angel love, why, I wondered why he didn’t come for me before now, and it seemed only polite to wait.”

But that’s not what happened.  Yes, the film ended, yes we walked outside together, her needing the fresh air, me _even actually supporting_ her, because she was shaky with pain _and_ with Hitchcock, yes we talked. 

We talked about a fella she knows who could do my new passport in a matter of hours and I could be on the first morning Eurostar, that she had a friend in Paris who would get me directly to Orly, how there was a flight to Australia and another friend of hers would take me to a little house she owns by a small, untouched beach, where she once hid for six months after a job in Japan went wrong and even the apparently almighty Yakuza never found her, and that was my best bet, apparently.  I suppose she thought that was why I’d stayed the length of the film; because I’d decided she was right and I would go.

I ran.  Obviously I did.  I ran back here, back home, to Mr Moriarty, to where I belong, to where I was made, to where I am myself, to where I can’t ever leave, because what would I be if I left?

I cry in the shower and rub all the vile, nasty, sticky oil of having sat next to her and all those stupid, ridiculous words she spat all over me off my skin in grubby grey flecks.  But eventually I have to get out.  Have to go and face him sometime.  I bundle up in my dressing gown and try to make it back to my own room, but he steps out at the living room door.  I have to go to him. 

Mr Moriarty takes me firmly by the shoulder.  He guides me to the armchair and puts me down.  It’s instinct to tuck up my feet beneath me.  If he wants to do anything to them, he’ll ask for them anyway.  And I’ll give them to him.  So really it doesn’t matter. 

He looks as if he’s been thinking about punishing me.  I can’t always tell, just sometimes.  Times like now, when he’s half-decided, I can tell.  He’s studying me strangely, as if he had no problem being angry until I was in front of him.  Something about me is making him hold off.  Then he stops thinking and starts waiting.  I pull in a deep breath, straighten my shoulders and begin, “I met Miss Mies completely according to plan.  Well, according to our plan.  Hers wasn’t exactly the same.”  Mr Moriarty asks what I mean, and I continue.  I tell him everything.  Everything. 

I tell him what that bitch said, about him killing me. 

That’s the only time I look up.  He’s supposed to say something, isn’t he?  I’m not dreaming that?  I’m not mad?  That is the moment when he is supposed to say something. 

And he does, in a way, but not to me.  The break in my words, wanting comfort from him, he fills smiling at some dim shadow up near the ceiling, and he breathes out, “Fecking cunt.”  It sounds like a horrible insult, but it isn’t.  You’re not here to listen, so you’ll have to take my word for it.  It is the very highest praise a god can offer to an absent saint, alright?

I lower my head again before he’s even noticed me looking and finish my report. 

At the end I look up again and he’s still smiling, still with his eyes on something in mid-air that I can’t see and nor can anybody else except for him.  “You have to love her,” he says, with a little shake of his head.

Shaking mine more firmly, “No I don’t.”

“That’s my girl; that’s your loyalty talking.  It’s the heart, not the head.”

I shrug, “Yeah, well, I’m not clever.”  Then again, since I said what I did, he has taken a metal nail file out of his pocket and tossed it away into the mess on the mantel beyond use, so I must have done something smart during this conversation. 

I’m about to ruin it all.  I can feel it coming.  It climbs the back of my throat like bile did when there was no poison to throw up.  A mistake.  I’m about to ask a question of him, which is unforgivable at the best of times.  Then you add on the fact that I really, really, deeply and emotionally and personally, want an answer, and that it’s a question about his upcoming plans, and that it implies I have an opinion on those plans, which is the very _height_ of impertinence, and I could have matching arms by the morning.  But I’m going to ask it.  I’m not going to be able to help myself.  It’s going to kill me otherwise. 

“Sir?” The tilt of his head, a little noise, I’ve got  his focus though none of his attention, “Please, are you going to kill me?”

_Now_ his attention, all of it, drops on me like death, like they say it does if you toss a penny off the Empire State building or the Eiffel Tower.  “What sort of a question is that?”

“I’m sorry,” and I put my eyes down on my hands, pressed hidden between my knees, as fast as I possibly can, “I know it’s stupid, I’m sorry, I shouldn’t have said anything, I just thought you might have reacted when I told you that and you probably even answered me already but I’m stupid and I missed it and I’m s-“

He grabs me by the chin.  “What are you, dear?”

“Yours, sir.”

“Yes, but _what_ , what sort of a creature, what particular breed of pet do I permit to continue on with me, here?”

“I’m your angel, sir.  Best angel, always.”

“And where do angels come from?”

“…From heaven, sir?”

“And who goes to heaven in the first place?”

“…Dead people, sir.”  My head hurts.  The last round of banging in my skull was Miss Mies trying to get out.  Now something is knocking to be let in, and before I even know what it is, I know I have to bar the door, I have to stand with my back to it and a shotgun to kill it if it gets in and keep my eyes shut and pray and scream for help against it.  “So I…  So I already count as dead.  So… So you’re not going to kill me?”

He lets go of my face.  That’s when I realize my eyes are shut, because I don’t see him do it.  I feel my hand grab out for his but I don’t even know where to grab and I get air, and I feel him smile beyond it. 

I feel him still smiling even though his voice pretends to be bored, exasperated, “So what difference would it make if I did, _a chuisle_ , _that’s_ the point.”

“So you _are_ going to kill me?”

“Now why would I do a thing like that?”  If he spoke softly and said that, if he hugged me and said that, I would laugh.  But I think it’s a real question, and my eyes start burning damp again.  “Would it bother you if I did?  You look all upset there.”

“No.”  Sitting up, wiping my eyes, opening them to look at him.  “No it wouldn’t bother me, no I’m not upset.  I just want to help you.”

“Oh, you will.  Don’t hold your pretty head over _that_.  Whatever is done with you will always be of use to me.” 

This is my fault.  For the reasons already stated it was a bad idea to ask the question.  It was a worse idea to wish with all of my heart and soul and rest of me that he would answer simply.  One word.  Yes or no.  The answer itself isn’t actually that important to me, but the knowing is.  Certainty, yeah?  But I made it my heart’s desire, and it’s not an angel’s place to even have a heart, and much less to have _desires_.  Desires are for real girls, and angels exist to grant them, not to suffer them.  Mr Moriarty probably really wants to be straight with me.  It’s probably killing him to have to be so cruel.  But he can’t have me going around thinking I can ask and presume and expect.  That would defeat my purpose.

“Besides,” he begins again.  I can tell by his tone that we’re finished here, “It’s like anything else.  _Everything_ else; every second of your living at all depends on whether or not you do as you’re told.”

The knocking starts up on my head again.  Asking to be let in; those words mean more than just the noises coming out of his mouth.  I could crack open those words and find a real answer. 

Or I could bolt the door. 

There is a cut glass ashtray out on the coffee table.  It’s always been there.  Neither of us smokes, but I’ve never thought about that before.  Miss Mies smokes.  But neither of us does, and so the pretty dish is full of little things.  Cast-off business cards, a bitten-down pen, the spare door key.  As I stand up to leave, I reach over and pick one, two, three safety pins out of the mess and take them with me. 

He just watches me.  Anybody who knows anything about it, about me and him, I tell you without commenting on it, Mr Moriarty just watches me take them.  He lets me take them and walk away.

I go to my room, get in bed with my pyjamas on.  I take down the towel wrapped around my hair, and spread it out damp over my lap. 

Then I open a safety pin, and press the point to the place where my left ring finger disappears under its nail.  There’s a little pop as the pin pricks through a recent scab.  A little bubble of blood swells up around it, but it’s alright, that’s what the towel is for.  It’s actually not as good tonight as it has been before; the pins are starting to find their old channels over and over again.  It’s getting to be like re-opening a piercing you’ve left empty for a while, rather than being so eye-wateringly painful as it used to be.  I think that’s sort of why Mr Moriarty stopped doing it.  It was losing its impact.  But then I push and, because the fingers of my right hand, the ones doing the pushing, are up to their knuckles in plaster, the end of the pin slips and I bite down a cry as the point cuts a slant into new flesh. 

And the tears stop burning behind my eyes.  So I push again until the pin tip pops out at the corner of my cuticle, and push again until I can close the pin. 

There’s no breath so deep as the one when it’s over.  There’s no skip between heart beats that goes on so long.  You get this one perfect moment where your mind is _entirely_ blank.  You are shut down.  You are already dead. 

My eyes closed, my head tipped back against the wall, I touch the two remaining pins.  They whisper to me sad but certain promises.  The knocking stops against my skull.


	7. Chapter 7

\- colonel pls can we talk?

\- dont think thats a gud idea, do u?

\- wudnt ask but i rly need 2 talk 2 u

\- u need 2 stop txtn me @ home.  will call u later.

\- no hell hear me talk.  pls meet me.

This has been going on for ages.  He leaves it twenty minutes, forty, an hour between messages.  I get it; he can’t draw Tom’s attention to it.  Can’t get asked who he’s chatting with, because if he lies, and Tom catches him, that’s bad days for the marriage.  And if he _doesn’t_ lie, and he calls me Tilly that used to babysit young Peter, Tom might say, “Whatever happened to her?” and Peter might say, “I went to play at her flat one night and Sebasdyun knocked her out against a wall and I helped with some ice.”  So I get why it has to be a secret, but I am working in secret too, after all.  If Mr Moriarty sees me get just _one_ message, he’ll want to know who it’s from.  I, too, could lie, and say Miss Mies.  There’s a reason she might get in touch with me directly.  But he’ll want to read it and then I’ll be in trouble.  So I could tell the truth, couldn’t I, and say it was the Colonel, but…  But then again we did kidnap the Colonel’s stepson for a couple of hours and then he knocked me out against a wall, didn’t he, so that doesn’t work very much better, really.

What I mean is, this isn’t easy for me either. 

Even at the very end, though he _does_ agree to meet me, the Colonel won’t tell me where or when.  Which would be alright if I didn’t have a job which is twenty-four hour and where I live with my boss.

I find that I tiptoe.  Even when Mr Moriarty goes out in the afternoon, and all I have to do is feed the cat and not break anything for an hour, I tiptoe.  I turn the TV down low as if I might be able to irritate him long range.  I channel-hop, and then stop abruptly and watch something I’m not interested in, because he hates when I channel-hop.  But he hates when I pander to him too, so I hop again until I find that program with the dinner parties, not the famous one from the terrestrial channel, the knock-off up in the three-hundreds, I like it better, it’s not so bitchy, and-  And I’m going mad, I think. 

Don’t fucking laugh.  Don’t _dare_ fucking laugh at me.

I know I’m mad, alright?  I know I’m all broken and stupid and put together wrong, I know all of that, so you don’t have to fucking laugh at me, I don’t deserve to be laughed it.  I mean by my standards, in my context, relative to my situ-fucking-ation, I’m going mad.  The last three fingernails of my left hand all have safety pins in them.  They worked for a second each, they made me feel better for three seconds in total.  I used the three seconds last night to fall asleep or I never would have slept at all.  But this morning over breakfast Mr Moriarty was flipping them over, back and forth on each nail.  Not for any reason, just because they were there and he had a free hand.  They started to hurt, then, and now they ache.  And I find that I think of Miss Mies, and that I can picture a small beach house in Australia, and I could live like a cat that comes and goes when it pleases and eats whatever it wants and I could sleep all day and get fat and be happy all alone and go swimming and stuff.  Sometimes I open my mouth and tell McLeod or an empty room, “I want to go home,” even though I’m standing in my home. 

I can’t remember the exact words he used last night, not all of it.  Mr Moriarty probably told me if I’m going to die or not, and I have forgotten the words.  All I really remember is him telling me, specifically, that it depended on whether or not I did as I was told.

Speaking of which, the Colonel finally messages me, that if I can meet him on his way to pick Peter up from school, he will spare me the quarter-hour it takes to get there. 

It’s awfully specific.  Fifteen minutes.  That’s all he’s willing to give me.  What happened with Peter before wasn’t my fault, but I suppose he blames me for being involved at all.  Actually I think he blames me even more than Mr Moriarty, because sometimes he comes over, and between them, everything seems to be all charm and smooth and like it used to be before, but he doesn’t talk very much to me.  He doesn’t mind if I make the tea or anything like that, and he’ll answer if I ask a question, and he always brings me beer or chocolate or something nice that way.  But he looks at me funny.  It must be blame.  I can’t think what else it would be so it must be blame.

But it’s a quarter hour.  It’s all I’m getting.  And if I miss him leaving his flat I get nothing.  So I get up and I make myself as presentable as I can with one hand.  I can’t do plaits or ponytails so I make sure my hair is nicely brushed and stick a hat over it.  My gloves, the one of them I can actually wear, will cover my safety pins so there’s no call to go looking for pliers.  I wear my good jeans again, not looking as good as they did last night before they’ve been in a heap at the foot of the bed since then, but with a long jumper they’re alright. 

I’m right at the door when it flies open.  I almost get my nose broke to match my arm.  “ _Jesus_!” but I swear I don’t mean it, it’s just shock, it’s instinct, I’m not really cursing.

But Mr Moriarty catches it and sighs, “Well, if you wouldn’t hover in the hall… Where are you going?”

“I told you.”  The words are out before I know I’m saying them.  “I mean… I was sure I told you.” 

Didn’t I say I was going mad?  He’s going to kill me.  Or… Or maybe he isn’t, I forgot the wording.  I almost wish he’d said yes, because then it would be planned, and I wouldn’t have to be scared of him murdering me _spontaneously_ for standing at the front door lying to him. 

“Whatever it is, forget it.  _You_ are off to meet one Samuel Benson this afternoon.  Art college drop-out, _medical_ drop-out, started a physiotherapy course but – guess what – dropped out, and still apparently managed to roll into one of the most comfortable posts in the country, and you, my dear - ”

At this he looks up, looks at me to illustrate his point, and he sees that I’m shaking my head most fervently.

I’ve got one chance with the Colonel and I’m only getting fifteen minutes.  And if I miss it, the Colonel will wonder why.  He might remember that I didn’t want Mr Moriarty to know he was meeting me.  I didn’t want to be heard talking, did I?  That could worry him.  Even if he doesn’t like me anymore like I think, he doesn’t want to think anything happened to me.  Should that happen, and he gets worried, he might come over, and I don’t know what that’ll do. 

“What do you mean, no?”, even though I never spoke out loud.

“I can’t.”

“ _Can’t_?”

“I thought I told you.  Tom, Seb’s Tom, Mrs Colonel Tom, he asked me if I could pick Peter up from school for them.  Seb wouldn’t have let him, but it was done before he knew about it.  So I _have_ to, and I have to be right and do it right, don’t I?  Because we have to keep the Colonel sweet, don’t we?  And he already doesn’t want me anywhere near Peter, but if I can do this right just today maybe he’ll start to-“

“Alright, alright,” he says.  He puts his hand on my shoulder, “Relax yourself.”  I get a breath for the first time since I started.  I better not have to say anymore because I don’t think I can go back into lying to him.  It’s hard to be certain but I don’t think I’ve ever done that before and it feels so horrible.  Not sick like having to put up with Miss Mies, but sick like rotting inside, like it would eat me hollow like cancer does if I ever did it again.  He says, “It’s the first thing he’s asked of you since… Isn’t it?”   I can deal with that, because I just nod, and if the first part had been true then yes, it would be the first thing the Colonel has asked of me.  “He concussed you for that.  That makes you even.  You don’t have to worry about that day with the little one.”  That’s not even a question to be answered, but I shake my head anyway.

Then he pushes me out the door.

“Alright, Dani’s little keeper will keep, I suppose.  Off you pop.  And pray you don’t get struck by lightning – should anything, even an act of God, happen to that child, it’s going to be all that nasty Tilly’s fault.”

That’s actually really nice of him.  That’s actually really sound advice, if I was actually going to collect Peter.

As things stand, now that I’m free and clear, I am all muddied down in the truth and my own hideousness and I cry like a lost little girl, like a madwoman out in the public, on the buses that take me down to Dalston.  There I stand in freezing February rain across the street from the Colonel’s front door, and I wait ever-so-patiently for him to come out. 

He comes down to the street and opens his car.  Then and only then does he nod me over.  I know why he does this.  By the time I cross the street he’s sitting down behind the wheel, see?  Because if he was standing up, still fumbling with the key, I was liable to hug him.  He knew that before I did, and he didn’t want it.  I still want to, and I would still try it, even with the gearstick biting my hip and at awkward angles and his shoulders are way too wide for such a small little runaround car anyway, except that he has made it so patently clear he doesn’t want to hug me. 

He doesn’t even say hello before he starts off driving.  We’re a whole street away before he says, “You don’t have much time, our Scout.”

He still calls me Scout.  That’s something, isn’t it?

“You have to help me bring Miss Mies home.”

“…He’s going after Dani?”

“I was quite surprised too.  But he knew it would happen, he told me ages ago, and told me to stop him, and then when I brought it up he said I could never stop him doing anything, and now I have to get her back.”

“Have you seen her?”  I tell him yes.  “And did you tell him what you saw?”

The leg, he means, and her being in museums, and her being delicate and having someone to drive her around and take her to lunch and maybe to do physio on her leg, and the leg.  “He still wants her.  More, even.  Maybe.  He keeps calling her clever and laughing and stuff.”

It must be catching, because the Colonel does it too.  His smile, however, is a bit stiff and grim.  He only mumbles, “She said this would happen,” in a voice that makes me think he didn’t believe her at the time.  Then, not smiling anymore, “The miserable, lonely _bastard_ …”

I didn’t hear that, alright?  If I get all wound up defending Mr Moriarty like I ought to, I’ll put him off completely and I’ll waste all my time.  If he decides to help me, I’ll haul him up on it later.  I’ll tell him, if he must talk that way, to do it in front of me, because it makes me very uncomfortable.  Right now, though, I’ll let it slide.  “But you _will_ help me, won’t you?  I don’t have anybody else to ask.  He didn’t tell me to ask you.  I really need help, Colonel.  And you’re back with us now anyway, so we can be together again, all of us.  We can have late breakfasts and stuff.”  And I’ll be doing as I’m told, even if I was never told in so many words, and bringing her home, and I’ll be safe, because whether I’m safe or not depends on whether or not I do as I’m told.

But I don’t say that to the Colonel.  God knows what would happen if he thought I might get killed.

“No, love,” he answers.  One hand lifts off the steering wheel.  It strains, trying to come towards me.  But it never gets more than a half inch off the wheel, and he puts it back down to take a corner and never picks it up again.  I don’t even have to _ask_ why, he explains anyway, “She doesn’t want to.”

“She only thinks that.  _You_ thought that.”  Even as I speak, I know the argument is over.  I’ve got all these other things I could say, want to say, but the consequences they would have stop me.  So there’s nowhere to go, and nothing to say.  There’s absolute silence for far too long.  It gives me time to get angry.  Not just because he refuses to help, but because he would only meet me like this.  I deserve better.  I deserve help, but if he won’t give me that I at least deserve to be really, properly listened to. 

Anger makes me cruel.  I search up the very meanest thing I could say and spit it out softly.  “You never told me she got injured.”

He stops at a corner, about two hundred yards from Peter’s primary school.  I look at him, waiting for a reason or for instructions. 

The Colonel reaches across me and opens my door.  Apparently this is where I get out.


	8. Chapter 8

Right, well… That’s that, then.

To hell with the Colonel. To hell with help.  To hell with Miss Mies and her decision and what she wants.

I think this must have been how Mr Moriarty felt. When he came back from the dead, he went right to Colonel Moran.  How unexpected, what a betrayal, when it turned out the Colonel didn’t want to play anymore.  And you _do_ stop caring.  I never realized until now that it’s happened to me.  You stop completely giving the tiniest little shit what that other person wants.  It becomes a matter of pride.  What about what _I_ want?  Who was it that decided Miss Mies is more important than I am?  For her it’s just personal preference; she can do her old thievey-shaggy bit anymore so she doesn’t want to be part of anything at all.  That’s petty.  That’s selfish. 

It’s actual _life or death_ for me.  Why does _she_ get to make that decision?

Nah. To hell with all of them. 

I walk home. It takes hours but at this time of day public transport would be just as bad.  And I like the walking.  My feet start to hurt, then throb.  There’s a burn in my legs, like an itch deep under the muscles.  And I like it. 

When I get home, it’s dark like midnight, though my phone says it’s only after six.

He’s in the kitchen. I can smell cooking and I don’t even want it.  Mr Moriarty says something, I think telling me not to linger in the doorway, to come and sit down.  But I don’t hear him properly and I don’t want to sit down.  He says, this time I hear, “Is he still not talking to you?”  It’s so rare for him to be gentle and sympathetic.  His voice is so kind right now.  I should be making the most of it.  If I sat down and cried and told him everything, he would listen.  Even if I told the truth, maybe I’d suffer for going behind his back, but maybe he’d get it.  Right now I feel like he would get it.

Faced with an opportunity I should be taking advantage of, I stay in the doorway and say, “Do you still need me to go and find… the bitch’s

 friend, what’s his name…?”

The boss turns to me. Turning away from his cooking, but keeping hold of a metal spoon which comes out of the pot steaming and looking like it ought to glow with heat.  “First off, what should you be calling _her_?”

“Sorry. Miss Mies’ friend.”

Because I have refused to come in and sit down, he now pulls me in, and puts me at the little table against the wall. He goes on with cooking and says nothing.  My mind goes away somewhere, I think, because the next time I even blink it’s because he’s putting a bowl of something in front of me.  I could ask what it is, but I’m expected to eat it either way so why bother.  Mr Moriarty looks at me a while longer, then shakes his head.  “You don’t have to go tonight.”

“I’d rather.”

“And you’re in no good place, so I’d rather you didn’t.”

“Whatever you need me to do, I can do it. Because it’s her own fault, isn’t it?  Miss Mies, I mean.  The second she knew you wanted her back she should have known it didn’t matter what she wanted.  So if we have to make her realize that, she brought it on herself.”

Mr Moriarty calls me brave and smart and a sweet child. Calls me his angel.  Sometimes he uses that name and I think, unable to stop myself, _So was Satan_.

Then he starts to tell about Samuel Benson. Mr Driver, Kitt, Lightning McQueen.  Most of it, he told me before I went out.  All the courses he started and never finished, Jack of all trades.  And at some point he met Miss Mies and she had a place for him that make use of all those things he half-knows.  This is all he has to tell because this is all anybody could possibly find out; aside from this, Benson is something of a non-event.  He doesn’t even have a criminal record.  Even I have a criminal record and I don’t have the same ID for two weeks at a time.  It’s bizarre.  I don’t think I’ve ever even had a full conversation with somebody who doesn’t have a criminal record.

That’s what Mr Moriarty wants me to do tonight.

Miss Mies is going to the opera. That’s not a sentence that should ever be spoken, but there it is.  Anyway, there’s only one ticket booked.  Benson is going to drop her off, then come back and peel her out of her chair at the end. 

Which gives him about three hours to kill, sticking close to Covent Garden in case it becomes too much for her and she needs him to pull her out at the interval. I’m to make myself part of those three hours.  Talk.  Find out whatever I can. 

“Why?” I ask. “Why do we care about him?  Doesn’t it work better if you just take him away?  He’s all the support she’s got, so –“

“Leave the plotting and planning to those that know about it.”

“Yes, sir.”

 

*

 

The night is so cold my breath turns to frost on my lips. There must be something very special on at the Opera House, because all the cars pulling up past me are gliding, silent things with darkened windows, like ghosts.  If I thought anyone could see me, I’d be worried about how I look.  I’ve got my dress on, which is neither best nor worst but _only_ , but with tights and heavy socks and boots and my coat I’m such a student. 

But nobody sees me. They see sharp cut suits and sweeping dresses. 

I watch for the Lexus from the other morning. By comparison to the other cars it’s not even that impressive.  She never should have got rid of the Aston, if you ask me.  It was small, but it was pure quality, and it had that artful, old fashioned look she likes to think she’s got.  This new car is too modern, too smooth.  I bet this Benson fella picked it out. 

But there it is. It swings past like all the rest.  A most handsome gentleman, who has been waiting shivering at the front step, darts across the road and gets the back door before Benson can even get out of his driver’s seat.  He offers Miss Mies one hand, and the other takes her cane.  So few people know the proper etiquette for canes.  I don’t actually know it, but this looks right.  Maybe she’s settling.  This, if anything, is more disturbing than when I thought Benson was some kind of plaything.  It disturbs me how easily I can picture her, after all those years powering through men like water through salt, just running out of steam and stopping.  Stopping at one that understands her little mental problem with art and who, I watch him now, doesn’t pay any attention to her while she adjusts her cane and painfully straightens her leg, but instead shifts her enormous fur collar around her shoulders, draws back her hair at one side.  Imagine someone telling Miss Mies they love her.

Or he’s just tonight’s-man and that’s better and I can stop feeling ill. I have to get myself into position. 

Me not having a car of my own, I could be a very ineffective follower, but I’m not, I’m good at it. If Benson drives off somewhere now, even just to park up, I’m liable to lose him.  But the traffic and the neatness of this street, built for carts and not cars, and not even supposed to have cars on it, and the number of cars about breaking that rule, that gives me a long, slow-moving river round the corner past the Disney Store, back out to the main roads, where I can grab him.

This is a trick I learned from my boss. Last time he did it, it was pointless and he got really hurt and he could have faked it anyway.  I have taken the idea and refined it. 

I go stand where the corner forces the cars close to it. I look left and right between them, waiting for a break in the traffic which I know isn’t going to come.  Eventually Mr Benson trundles up.  There’s a traffic light which has stopped everything just changing green.  I count the cars moving slowly off back to him, watching the brake lights go out one by one.  Two cars to go, a bored Mr Benson glances up at his rearview.  The lights right in front of him go out and draw his attention back, and his foot automatically to the accelerator.  And that is the moment when I get bored of waiting for a break and dark into the practically stationary traffic, and the front corner catches my hip just at the headlight. 

I don’t make a big deal of falling over the hood like some people would. He has felt and seen me, so I sit down hard, legs out straight.  Before he can come out to me, I get my knee up good and tight against the wheel.  Legs could be the way to go, since he probably sees a lot of Miss Mies’ mangled remains.

“I’m alright,” I call, as soon as I hear the door open. Mumbling, “My own fault… stupid…  I’m alright.”  The words get distorted by the chattering of my teeth, the frigid flutter of my lower lip.  With my plastered arm, I can’t push up off the road.  He comes and helps me.  Big strong hands, but you’d expect that from a physiotherapist.  Very warm hands, too.  I brush the snow off the backs of my legs.  “I’m okay.”

“You’re sure you’re not hurt?”

I’ve bene taught before that people who say that are only thinking of their car insurance. I’m probably being very silly, but Benson doesn’t sound that way. 

“It was my fault,” I say. “I was hurrying for the train, that’s all.  I have to go.”

And Mr Benson, my sister’s keeper, it’s like he’s got my script, because he says, “Wait. I’ll get you there.”

Thinking of his car insurance. In case I run off to hospital and get some nice solid A&E records I can stand behind in court.  He wants to keep me around until he’s sure I’m definitely not injured.

“Mate, I’m going right up to Camden, don’t worry about it-“

But it’s a route he knows well. He won’t take no for an answer, and anyway we’re blocking the traffic stood here talking about it.  Before I know, I’m in the passenger seat, relaxing into soft leather.  Inside the Lexus is virtually silent, a sweet-scented bubble completely apart from the dark and noise of the city.  It’s quite the most calming place I’ve ever been, and I suppose maybe that’s why Miss Mies likes it, now that she’s visiting museums and ballets and such.

He introduces himself. I told you he’d call himself Sam.

I call myself Amanda. It’s the last name Mr Moriarty gave me before I left the flat. 

Speaking of the boss, I text him now to tell him I’ve got Benson and I’m in his car. Benson eyes me warily, clears his throat when I see him looking.  “Oh, don’t worry.  Just letting my mates know I’m behind schedule.  It’s not, like, your reg or anything,” and I laugh because I’ve already got that.

“Listen, if you-“

“Nah, mate, it was a bump. I fell over out of shock more than anything.  Besides, I need the lift more than I need the fraud.”  I hold up my plaster cast and spin some story how I’m already getting paid out by a bus company, bits and pieces he doesn’t have to believe and has no reason not to.  “Were you at the opera house or what?”

He tells me he was dropping off the woman he works for, that he does a bit of a driving for her and helps her out at home.   Saying more than he means to, maybe, something he thinks ought to be private, because he stops abruptly.  I’m waiting with, “I’m live-in help too.  Like a PA, not, like, cleaning or nothing-“

“Oh, not me either. Physio.”

“She not well, your boss?”

Tossing up true things, half-true things, and what he’s happy to tell me, “She had a fall once. Crushed the leg.”  He mutters a couple of things like ‘not much to do’ and ‘damage control’ while I look him over.  He doesn’t _look_ like a drop-out.  He looks like a nice, strong man, young and clean.  Clean-shaven, clean-cut, clean-minded.  I suppose there are lots of reasons people drop out of courses, it doesn’t have to be because they’re crap.  Maybe it wasn’t for them or they’re not ready for it or other parts of their life get in the way. 

Suddenly I really, really want to be nice to him. “Sounds like a great job.  If you like her and you get to drive an excellent car and go posh places and stuff.”

He starts talking about the posh place he gets to go because I mentioned it. I am only half-listening.  If I thought any of this would be important or I’d have to report it back, I’d be committing it word-for-word to memory.  But it’s not, is it?  If this Benson is nobody, Mr Moriarty won’t care about him.  And we are, after all, going to have to take him away somehow.  Pull the rug out from under that crushed leg there isn’t much to do about except damage control.  The longer I’m here, the more I wonder _why_ I’m here. 

He takes the smaller side streets, knowing the way intimately. And we have gotten on to talking about the opera, how he hates it, how glad he was someone else offered to take Miss Mies so he didn’t have to go, when one of those narrow, dark places is lit up by blue flashing lights. 

“Seems you’re not the only one had a close shave tonight,” he says to me, and pulls to the curb, out of the way.

But the lights aren’t on an ambulance, they’re on a police car, and it doesn’t fire on past, but stops, blocking us in. Mr Benson isn’t clever enough, but I know to look out the windscreen and into the rearview mirror; either end of the street, cars  pull up to block it off.  They are longer and blacker than any I saw at the Opera House, and they are more like hearses.  The men who get out look much like mourners, dressed in shades of black and shuffling their feet. 

They don’t come near, though. The doors of the police car open and two uniformed officers get out.  One comes to Benson’s window so he can ask what’s going on.  One comes to my door and helps me out.  “You can go, miss,” he says. 

For a moment I go nowhere.

“You can go,” he says more sharply, so I run.

  


	9. Chapter 9

I run and keep running.  Keep looking back behind me for the men in the suits, for the cars that blocked the street.  They’re more dangerous than coppers.  They got me once before, and took me to see Mycroft, but nobody could prove anything and I was too mad to properly interrogate and eventually they let me go.  They tried to follow me but there wasn’t anybody I could have run to at the time.  Everyone was dead.  Coppers don’t scare me.  Even if they’d arrested me out of the car right alongside Mr Benson, I’d have been out in an hour.  My ID says Belle Mayweather and I only got it yesterday.  There hasn’t been time for Belle to have done anything wrong, except that she walked into the wrong car twenty minutes ago. 

Out of running, I stop and turn into this little café I know, which I’m almost certain used to be a storage room between the shops on either side, it’s so tiny and narrow.  I can order a coffee and not stop walking on my way to a table at the back.  And given the whole place is only wide enough to have a door on the front and no wall at all, I look out through the glass and watch the people that pass in the street and the cars that stop at the lights.  I set an alarm for five minutes on my watch.

When that time has passed and I see nothing scary, I take out my phone and call home.

_So soon?_ , he’ll say.  Or, _What did you do?  How’d you get kicked out of the car so quick?_

But Mr Moriarty says, “Evening, dear.”

“Hi…  Um… There’s been a bit of a hitch?  With Mr Benson?  Because I was having him drive me so I could talk to him, only he got pulled over and-“

And me being in a public place, I stop, but Mr Moriarty is ready to fill in, “ –And he got arrested.”

“Yeah, only it wasn’t _just_ the trevors?  I saw-“

And again, me not knowing all the euphemisms like him and the Colonel and all, I pause so I can fumble around for the right one, and he doesn’t need me to.  “ –Suits as well, like the Five Alives.”

“Yeah, like them.  You knew about it.  I thought you said he wasn’t anybody?”

“He’s not.  Well, not that he knows of, anyway.”

  Oh, Mr Moriarty didn’t just _know_ about the arrest.  He _did_ the arrest.  Set it up, made it happen, whatever he would have had to do…  He must have made up a crime, and then faked some proof, and then given it to the right people so that they would know there’s a connection to him and Miss Mies and…  And I’m not smart enough for the rest, but he got Mr Benson arrested, and probably got him taken by those mourners, those darker gentlemen in their terrifying cars. 

I remember when they took me.

“Sir, do you think they’ll-?”

This time I only stop because I don’t want to say it.  It doesn’t matter, though, he’s still ready.  “Kill him?  Depends if they believe him or not when he says he knows nothing.”

That means yes.  They’ll never believe him.  If Mr Moriarty set it up, he set it up properly. 

It’s a very strange thought, that a few minutes ago I was talking to him, and he was being so kind, driving me around because I was too stupid not to walk in front of a moving car.  He was nice and liked his job.  He was gentle, with strong hands and looked very clean, as if maybe that was something he’d learned during his brief spell as a medical student.  And already I am thinking of him in Was-and-Had-Been.  In past tense.  I think I must be a very awful person, to move to past-tense so easy and fast.

“Angel?  You’ve gone awful quiet.”

“No, I’m here.  I’m still here, I’m just…  What did you need me for, then?  If he’s just going to be… _gone_ , why did I have to talk to him?”

Smiling to himself, “The answer’s right there in your hand.”

  My phone.  My phone can be tracked, see?  So that Mr Moriarty can always know where I am, and in case something happens to me while I’m running sensitive documents or weapons or plastic or poison in my shoulder bag.  Had Mr Benson been left to his own devices tonight, heaven knows where he might have ended up, killing time until the interval.  A normal arrest can be made anywhere, but a special one, an Arrest Plus Five, that needs somewhere quiet.  It also needs certainty, so you don’t go chasing after the wrong car or the wrong man.  That could be very embarrassing, as well as blowing the whole operation because your _actual_ target now knows you are after them. 

I never had to talk to Mr Benson at all.  I could have slipped into the boot of the car while he waited at the lights and done the same job, except I’d be suffocating in a police impound right now.

“Angel?”

“I’m still here.”

“Good.  What I need you to do now is text Miss Mies.  She won’t see it until the break, maybe not even then.  Awfully bad form, don’t you know…  Just tell her she needs to arrange an alternative lift home.  She won’t call to bollock you, she’ll call me.  That’ll end with me picking her up so I might not be here when you get back.”

“No…  No, won’t work, sir.”

“…Beg pardon?”

I tell him as quickly and gently as I can about the hitch in his plan, about how Miss Mies might have only booked one ticket but somebody must have thought for the seat next to her.  About the man who met her from the steps and straightened her fur collar.

“Interesting.  Well, you still do your little part, dear.  And then, wherever you’re sitting now, leave that phone under the table and walk away from it.  Don’t worry, your upgrade’s already sorted.”

“Yes, sir.  Thank you, sir.”

“And well done getting in the car, dear, you’re forever impressing me these days-“

“Please.”  The interruption aggravates him.  I feel it from all these miles away down the line.  He was _complementing_ me, he was being _kind_ and _generous_ and I cut him off.  But I’m really sorry, I just can’t listen to him right now.  “I just really don’t like this phone right now anymore?”

“Of course,” but I’m in for it later, I can just tell.  “Quite right too.  See you soon, Angel.”  He hangs up before I can apologize again.

So now I have to send a message to Miss Mies.  The wording of it is hard.  Just telling her she needs to book a cab or bother her companion doesn’t really seem right.  But then again, the message has to be professional and ‘OMG relly soz didn no wat I was doin’ is hardly professional.

_Ran into Sam.  Seems v. nice but he cant collect u tonite.  Hope u’ll b ok.  Lots of love, Axx_

I send it before I can rethink again. 

Then I hold my phone under the table and dismantle it.  The shell gets tucked down the side of my seat.  The sim card, I drop in my coffee.  And I take the battery with me to the Tube station and drop it in the bin. 

They have to kill him anyway, you know.  Even if they’re completely convinced he’s innocent.  _Especially_ if they’re completely convinced he’s innocent, because a completely innocent party can complain about police picking him up with no proof or false proof, and he can go to the papers about the sneaky, nameless men in dark suits.  So either way, he’s dead.  I shouldn’t have asked that question. Mr Moriarty shouldn’t have given me such a maybe-maybe-not answer, with all that hope in it. 

Such a strange thing; I stand on my train, swinging around with my wrist in a hanging loop and one set of toes on the floor and the weight of my cast carrying me round and round, and then back in the other direction when the strap gets too tight.  People stare at me.  Not outright, not fixed-eye because you can’t do that on the Tube.  In little glances, whenever I’m turned away from them, gaze flicking down again as I spin past.  It’s alright, because I stare too.  I stare right at each and every one of them and wonder, is any of them thinking about the man they helped kill tonight?  Have any of them ever been in this postion?  In any way, I mean; pulled the plug on a relative or walked past a homeless person who died of hypothermia or driven over a pothole and not reported and some poor motorcyclist hit it and got flung into a wall and their skull exploded.  When you start and think about it, there are a hundred thousand casual little murders you might commit every day.

You know when you think of something funny, and you laugh at something no one around you can see, and you worry that you look mad?  What if somebody with a mental problem or a huge persecution complex sees it, and thinks you’re laughing at them, and then they top themselves?

You see what I mean, don’t you?  Or do you?  Maybe you have to have been here, like me. 

Or maybe I’m insane and nobody else notices this because it’s not real. 

I take the stairs when I get home.  By the time I reach the flat I’m out of breath and very tired.  This is in case Mr Moriarty is at home.  I know he said he wouldn’t be, but I don’t think Miss Mies will actually call him.  The Colonel didn’t call when he was expected to.  If I look very tired, maybe he’ll just let me go to bed. 

He’s out.  I know before I even open the door because there’s no light creeping out from underneath it.  I don’t turn any on when I get in either.  I lock the door behind me and shove straight into my bedroom.

I couldn’t have missed him by much.  He must have been in the lift as I slogging up to the stairwell.  I know _this_ because there is a cup of tea sitting next to my bed, and the steam is still rising from it, making dragons against the orange streetlight out the window.  There is a small slice of cake too.  McLeod is asleep on my pillow. 

Laid out across the end of my bed is a dress with a round skirt and long sleeves and a little brooch on the neckline.  It is black and made of velvet.

I told you I’d be in trouble tonight, didn’t I?


	10. Chapter 10

She didn’t call.  I told you she wouldn’t.  I didn’t tell the boss because I know better than to try and tell him anything, never mind to be right about it.

So for five days, I have to live with him.  Mr Benson is dead by the day after, and there is no autopsy to take up time, but those who killed him still have to set up the discovery of him.  Mr Moriarty calls it ‘legitimising the kill’, which is a phrase I hate but I can’t get it out of my head now.  He follows it all by bullet points, and he tells me about it, but I do my best not to hear anything.  It’s probably very yellow of me, but I don’t want to know.  I know he’s dead.  In my opinion that’s the beginning and the end of it, wouldn’t you agree?  Mr Moriarty doesn’t.  In fact, if you were listening to him, you might think the death itself doesn’t factor in at all.  The way he talks, sometimes I forget that Mr Benson is dead.

Miss Mies texts me on the third day.  It says, _Have you seen enough now, sweetheart?_  I don’t know how to answer, so I don’t.

She texts again on the fifth day.  It says, _Don’t fucking dare_ , and I’ve got no idea what it even means.  Lucky for me, right at that moment, Mr Moriarty walks in and throws me a folded newspaper.  He says, “Tomorrow,” and I feel like I missed an important line somewhere, like they had a conversation I’m supposed to know about, until finally I look down and find that he has circled a little inch of close black column, which announces the funeral of Samuel Benson. 

From that I learn his age and that he had parents.  Those are facts I didn’t have before, and which I’d be willing to bet Mr Moriarty still doesn’t have.

I’m not judging him or nothing like that, I’m only saying.

There’s no question over whether or not we’re going.  Miss Mies’ message doesn’t leave a lot of room for argument, but it comes far too late.  The plans were made already.  Five nights ago, I came home to a black dress.  I’m going to the fucking funeral, no questions, no excuses, no moaning. 

I don’t even tell him she’s been texting me.  What would be the point?  And he’s been difficult enough already.  I thought my itches were bad, under the cast, but his are insane.  His are in his head, waiting for her to give in and call, asking himself why she hasn’t, what he should have done differently, why he’s having to show himself in public and she wouldn’t come to him like the Colonel did.  The Colonel walked right up to the front door.  I try telling him that, one of the nights when he’s pacing so late I actually can’t sleep and get up to keep him company.  He’s wandering round the kitchen like a soul around hell and I sit at the breakfast bar with McLeod and try to tell him, Miss Mies isn’t like Colonel Moran.  And that he wants her back purely because she’s not like Colonel Moran?  He wants her back because she’s smarter and more difficult and she stands up to him?

He doesn’t hear a word.

Anyway, on the sixth morning, the day God polished off the world I suppose, I get up and make a shaky, left-handed attempt to paint my face, to brush out my hair.  I have to get him to help with the zip of the dress.  Then I make a late breakfast while he chooses a tie and cufflinks and picks in minute detail over a dozen things she’s not even going to notice because she’s going to be too busy murdering me for what I done the other night at the Opera House. 

That wasn’t fair.  He oughtn’t have sent me.  There must have been a dozen ways to track the car.  Maybe it’s all part of the plan, and this is how I die, murdered in vengeance by Miss Mies. 

It probably sounds stupid but my coat (my nice coat, which isn’t warm enough but _is_ black) is hanging up in the hall with a knife the Colonel once gave me in the pocket.  Because it wasn’t my fault and it wasn’t fair of Mr Moriarty to do that to me.  They call it burning, you know.  Like when the boss told that horrible creepy Danish prick about Uncle Charlie, and Uncle Charlie couldn’t work anywhere in the country anymore and had to go back to Florida.  The creepy fella’s dead now so it was okay when we brought him home again, but that is my best example of what they call a burn.  Mr Moriarty burned me with the Colonel when he made me help kidnap little Peter.  And he has burned me now with Miss Mies.  I could have died with Penny or Angus or anybody along the way.  Maybe this is fun for him; putting me in the way of all these fires and waiting to see which one lights me up. 

But these are bad thoughts.  These are nasty, disloyal thoughts and I put them away, out of my mind.  It’s not hard, given that’s where I usually am. 

We don’t go to the church.  Both of us thought that might be a bit much.  We go directly to the graveyard, and find the opened plot.  Mr Moriarty picks a spot for us, at a respectful distance where someone who was looking for two strangers might still see.  Then we wait. 

It’s only out of boredom that I look at a new burial near us, at the white frill flowers on it and ask, “What are those?”

“Anemones,” he says.

Says me, “They’re nice.”

Says him, “I’ll bear it in mind,” and after that I don’t go making anymore of my own funeral arrangements, thank you very much.

It is not a big funeral, when it finally arrives.  The parents are there, obviously, and he had enough brothers, cousins, mates, whatever, to carry the coffin, but not much more than that.  That seems strange to me, since he was so nice and kind, I’d thought he’d be popular.  But maybe you don’t keep in touch with people when you live every day with an invalid.  Anyway, they come and they gather and they put him in the ground.

Because I am finding that a bit difficult to watch, I watch Miss Mies instead.  She came in the same car as some of the others, and one of the younger people I don’t know helped her out of it.  Since then, however, she has stood apart.  The parents don’t look at her.  The others do but only from the corners of their eyes, and with strange curiosity; they’ve never met her.  They don’t meet her today.  She stands silent, even when her leg starts to ache from it, even when more and more of her weight is pressing the cane down on the earth.

“She hasn’t seen us,” I mutter.

“She has.  She doesn’t want anybody else to see us.”

I am ashamed to say that I doubt him, right up until the end of it.  The roses and the handfuls of earth all thrown, the ashes to ashes read out and the song stuck in my head, that’s it, it’s over.  You go in the ground and the people go away and some big fellas you don’t know fill in the hole on top of you.  I don’t know that I’d be thinking of it that way if I was certain I wasn’t going to be next, but in my current state, between knowing and not admitting to myself, I see it with terror. 

I see with even greater fear that the only person not drifting slowly away from the graveside is Miss Mies.  She stands still with her head bowed until even the parents are gone, and so is the car that brought her here. 

Then, alone but for the men with the shovels hovering nearby, waiting to get started, she lifts her eyes and they burn directly into me. 

No, not me.  No, they just hit me on their way to Mr Moriarty.

Faster than I would have thought she was still capable of, a stronger stride than her twisted leg should support, she starts towards him. 

"Sir..."

"I know.  Don't worry, love; I can take a slap."

But I don't know.  I've seen Miss Mies slap people before.  She carries her hand open, and flexes any crackle out of her knuckles, shakes her elbow loose, so her arm will roll like a whip.  Believe me when I tell you, it really stings.  She's not doing any of that.  Her hanging hand is balled up.  "I think she's going to punch you."

He shakes his head, "Not ladylike."

"Boss, look at her?  Like she cares?"

"And what else can I do, Angel, run away?"

Which is fair enough but really, you need to see her face, she's going to fucking kill him.  She looks like she's boiling, so angry she glows.  Like a cartoon, except cartoons aren't scary.  "Please, sir-"

"She can see you talking, y'know.  You want the same treatment?"

"No, but-"

"Shut up, Angel."

He's really brave.  Some people forget that.  They think because the stuff he does tends to be bad that he must necessarily be a coward, because criminals are a cowardly bunch, but that, I think, is a scurrilous rumour begun by the Batman.  But there really is courage in letting one of your best mates storm towards you, built out of pure murder, and doing nothing to stop her.  And to shut me up, so she won’t turn her fury on me, that’s pure kindness.   

Not that pure kindness is going to stop me telling him, here and now, that if she pulls out her old favourite cut-throat razor with the mother-of-pearl handle with the enamel floral inlay, I will not be jumping in front of it for him.

But I never get a chance to tell him anything. Miss Mies is close now.  Now, finally, he sees what I saw before; the cane is not _under_ her left hand, being pushed supportive down into the earth on each step.  It is _in_ her hand, held in a fist beneath the bulb at the top, barely supporting her at all so that she staggers,fast and is not stopping, and he has just time to breathe out, "Bollocks," as she brings that brutal club up under his chin.

He drops.  Of course he bloody does.  He hits his knees and in the same second she would fall on top of him, spinning unbalanced off her too-straight leg, except I grab her at the elbow.  She hardly seems to notice me.  "What do you think you're doing here?!  Who the hell do you think you are?"  

Her grip shifts, tossing up the cane to have it by the narrower end.  It's longer than a golf club and twice as heavy; I reach across her and bar her arm down, "Miss Mies, no!"

She spins on me blazing, "Do I look like I'm in the mood for lunatics just now?  You stay out of this."  That's a bit not-nice, that is.  That's a bit not necessary, calling me names.  Her swinging arm has slackened, so I stand back.  I let go of her where I caught her from falling and hurting herself, so she'll finally realize it was me that did that.  She falters for all of a second, just a little soft flash of her eyes to me, before she starts again, "And _you_ -" and with the cane end she prods Mr Moriarty's shoulder, "Get the fuck up."

"Hang on," he mumbles, a little red seeping at the seam of his lips.  "I've bit half my fecking tongue off here."

"Get up or I will put you down flat."  So he sighs, pushes up from one knee, straightens himself in front of her.  His expression is blank, except for little flickers of pain.  Except for touching the blood off his mouth, he doesn't move.  "He was _no one_ ," she hisses at him.  "And he is dead, because... They called me, you know.  The parents weren’t close, his phone, I was the emergency n…  I identified him.  What was left, I identified..."

"Mmh, they _do_ tend to remove the parts you'd recognize best-" or at least that's what the sentence should be.  It gets fumbled and lost the moment she hears that he's taking the piss and draws back, ready to swing again.  Without me holding her up she overbalances too soon and stumbles.  A bend in her leg, one she isn't used to anymore, makes her cry out.  Not even swearing, the pain too sharp for that, for anything except an animal noise.  This time it's Mr Moriarty who catches her.  Slumped against his chest, him holding her up by both wrists, he supports her until she can support herself.  She turns her face away so he won't see the tears in her eyes, but he knows.  Even though I’m stood here watching the purple blooming over his jaw, opening black and yellow like an ugly rose, he strokes her hair and helps her stand again.  Saying, "There now," and, "No rush."  He takes the cane out of her hand, which at least seems sensible, only to give it back once she's upright.

I stand back.  What else can I do?  I don’t even want to look at them."Vile fucking bastard," she calls him, and he smiles into thin air over her head.  Then, with a sigh, she finally lifts her eyes, studying his swelling face.  "Did I break your jaw?  I meant to. Thought it might shut you up."

"No such luck.  Lucky for _you_ , though; jaw's my best feature.  Who knows what I'd do if you wrecked that?" She flares like she might hit him again.  Then it all turns bitter and she laughs.  No noise to it, but her shoulders and chest shake.  Laughing or crying, I don't think it matters.  Either would help, when Mr Moriarty tips up her chin and asks, "I'll drive you home if you'll spare me some ice for it?"


	11. Chapter 11

The naming of cats is a curious thing.  This is something someone said to me once.  I think it’s from something.  It sounds like it ought to be, and the person who said it sounded like they were trying to be very wry and clever and better than me, which is generally when people have to quote other people.  Anyway, it has always stuck with me, because of Miss Mies, because in her case it is really rather true. 

You’re going to have to forgive me if I get a bit rambly.  See, I’ve had a drink.  I wasn’t supposed to at first but then everybody else had one and it became okay.  In the morning it might not be okay anymore, and I’ll probably be in trouble, but for tonight it’s okay.

We are at Miss Mies’ place.  Not her big fancy new place by the park with the white front and the railing up the side of the steps, but her place she’s always been in, the little flat in Camden, which strikes me as odd.  There are two reasons for this; firstly, though we came up in it tonight without a hitch, the old-fashioned service lift is usually broke.  Why would a lady with a cane chance having to take the stairs, I ask you?  Hardly like she thought Mr Moriarty was going to carry her, he is very much a Professor X as opposed to a Superman, although he can walk, so it’s not actually that great an analogy.  You know what I mean, though, he’s weedy, that’s what I’m saying, only I was trying to be nice about it and…  And I was discussing something else…  Oh, yes, second reason.  Second reason it’s weird that we would come here.  It’s actually the same as the first reason; the bedroom of this flat is on a mezzanine which is only accessible via a narrow, metal spiral staircase.  With the brace on her leg, I don’t even think she could fit between the rails, and I am fairly certain she can no longer climb it.  This is proven to me by the aforementioned-banisters, which were always covered in clothes and underwear and other people’s clothes and scarves and headphones and anything that drapes.  They still are, but only up to about head-height.

I am a very clever angel.  You could perhaps forget this about me.  I am reminding you now that I have had a drink.  When I have had a drink, I am just stupid enough to permit myself to be clever.  When I am sober I am clever enough to know I must pretend to be stupid.  But while we’re here, while it’s just us and I am incapacitated, you should know that I am smart.

Anyway, we came here, and we came inside.  The whole long drive from the graveyard, which was quiet but not uncomfortable, I had imagined there being an argument about that.  Like we’d arrive and she’d reach for her door and Mr Moriarty would reach for his and she’d say, “What on _earth_ do you think you’re doing?” in her toffee-nosed voice, and thank him for the lift and just go.  But there was no argument.  There was no question.  It was very beautiful.  We are all inside.  They are sitting at either end of the couch, but turned to face each other.  Nobody checked the wine – or the glasses – for poison.  For the first ten minutes or so they discussed Mr Benson, why it was done, and whether or not she understood.  She confirmed that she did, and since then it hasn’t been mentioned. 

They’re talking differently now.  Talking in a way that doesn’t even happen those nights the Colonel comes to visit out place.  They’re talking like they used to.  He is idly looking over her cane, and realizes there is a bright, shining stone set in the top of it.  “Is that-?”

“Before you even begin –“ she says, “It is a quartz replica.”

“Don’t talk shite.  That is the Petrova diamond.  I got hit in the face with seventeen-millions’ worth of unsolved mystery.  You’re carrying this around everywhere?”

Right away!  So soon!  So easy!  I could cry I’m so bloody delighted, but I think I’d need another vodka-Diet Coke before I could just come out and cry.

I’m safe!  It’s done, she’s back, I did as I was told.  And my continuing, moment to moment, depends on whether or not I do as I’m told.  And it’s done now, so I’m safe and alive

Now a soft paw reaches up and touches my face and reminds me of my very first train of thought.  The naming of cats is a curious thing. 

I am sitting on the floor at some distance from them, and I have not one but two cats to play with.  It is really rather lovely.  Neither of them is the cat she had the night everybody died, almost three years ago now.  Vesper, apparently, didn’t like when she came home with a new, unrecognizable leg.  She didn’t like the brace or the cane, and so she left one night through an open window and never came back.  It’s quite sad, but it left room for two new mogs.  Miss Mies has the time to take care of two now.  They are a brother and sister, black with white patches. 

We’ve been playing for a while now.  It was only a few minutes since when I turned up their collars to read the names on their tags. 

At the next gentle break in the thoroughly lovely conversation they are having, I say, “Miss Mies?”

“Yes, love?”

Twiddling a name-tag with my fingertip, “The _names_ …”

“Oh, yes, do tell,” Mr Moriarty smiles, same as me, because we both know there are always fun stories behind the names of cats.  Cats get named after disasters.  Miss Mies says it is her way of reconciling herself with painful memories.  You name something you love and care for after something you hated very much.  It forces you to accept it, and feel better things than hatred towards the terrible event.  “What’s the first one there, Angel?”

“This lady is called… _Cass_.”

“As in –ablanca,” Miss Mies mumbles.  One hand comes up and hides her eyes, pinches the bridge of her nose.  She must not be totally reconciled to this one yet.  More mumbling, but I am sharp tonight and I catch every word, “Longest two months of my life…  Flat on my bloody back in that baking hotel room for two fucking months.”

Mr Moriarty laughs, “In fairness, if you add up all the other time you’ve spent on your back, it probably amounts to a lot more than-“ He doesn’t finish that sentence because she slaps him.  But only light this time, and only his shoulder.  Not trying to cause damage like she did before.  He feels safe to laugh again when I ask what she was doing on her back for two months in Casablanca.

Another long sigh, “Do we have to talk about my cat stories?”

Mr Moriarty says, “No.”

Says me, “But-“

Says him, “Angel, leave it.  You’re a guest, remember?”

_In this flat or down out of heaven_ , not-says me, and says aloud, “But it’s not like I want all nasty details and stuff, I just-“

“My leg,” she cuts in.  “When I fell, that was Morocco.  It was two months before I could travel.”

Mr Moriarty is glaring at me.  The look very patently says I have had quite enough of the story and now I should shut my mouth.  But the last time he was supposed to tell me, he didn’t bother.  So now that I’ve got a proper source, and she doesn’t seem all that pissed off talking about it, I feel like I should make the most of my chance, shouldn’t I?  So says me, “But why, then, were you in a hotel and not a hospital?”

“Did you get your arm straightened in a proper hospital?”

“No, because I don’t really exist, officially.”

“Well, I do, and if I exist in any official capacity in Morocco, I could be arrested and very probably executed.  But that’s a whole other story from many years ago.”

Bones mend how they’re set.  That’s what Mr Moriarty kept saying to me, taking me to get my arm seen to properly.  Bones mend how they’re set.  Miss Mies’ bones, in a hotel room and not a hospital, mended how they were set.  They mended twisted and imperfect.

“Well, was it a very important job?  Why were you there if they would have executed you?”

Mr Moriarty straightens up and sets his wine glass away on the coffee table.  I panic first, because I think he’s freeing his hands so he can strangle me with them.  I gather up the cats and put them in front of me, which is selfish and cruel, but that doesn’t stop it being smart.  However, his hands do not claw out towards me, but shape the empty air in front of Miss Mies, making the words of his story as he mutters them.  He speaks in soft, low syllables, as if he expects her to attack him again.  The cat called Casablanca pulls away from me and slips over to her mistress.  Maybe she can sense that she’s needed.  She submits to being stroked by hands that are very cool and precise.  I am having just a little trouble focussing, so I don’t totally understand the expression on her face.  It looks like she’s waiting, like she’s saying, in her toffee-nosed voice, _Well, James?  Why_ was _I in Morocco?_

And without that question ever being asked, he begins, “Dani, look, nobody asked you to follow.”

“And not know if you were alive or dead?”

“It was the only way to be safe, was if no one knew where I was.”  Silently, not turning her eyes from him for a second, she points directly at me.  And in just as many words as she uses, Mr Moriarty tells her _That’s the_ Angel _.  That’s_ different _.  She doesn’t count._   “I didn’t know it was you.  I knew there was somebody at my back, and I knew it wasn’t Holmes, but that was all.  I didn’t know it was you until…  Until you…”

She tips her head very slightly.  It is meant to make him finish his sentence.  But she’s very cruel; she doesn’t seem to see that he _can’t_.  Deep down somewhere, he’s very upset about the things he’s trying to say, and she’s trying to force him to say it anyway.  It’s very mean.  And when he still can’t say it, she forces it even more, by asking directly, “Until I what?”

He says, “Until I heard you _._ ”

She corrects, “Until I screamed?  You were that close, when I fell?  I got _that_ close?”

She would _like_ to scream now.  All her words turn to ice with it. 

He says again, “I didn’t know it was you.”

Me and the cat I’ve still got, we duck away to a farther part of the floor, chasing a shiny rubber fish the pair of us.  At least neither of us is having to watch them anymore.  An angry Miss Mies, I’ve seen a lot.  That doesn’t surprise or shock me and I am not afraid of it.  But the boss, though.  Him.  He looks like this is all breaking his heart, and mine breaks along with it.  We’re like that.  I feel what he feels.  It doesn’t work both ways, it only goes from him to me, not from me to him.  That’s alright; I don’t want him to feel how I feel. 

I try not to hear any more of their conversation.  I still do, but I’m trying not to, and so I won’t report.  It’s not a big stand-up argument.  It’s all very small and cold.  But ultimately, Miss Mies gets a bit tearful, and that’s his cue to toughen up again.  They’re just having it out.  That’s what I tell myself.  There has been a horrible misunderstanding, and it has gone undiscussed all this time.  I tell myself they just need to get it all out in the open, and in the meantime I have another little half-glass of something and feed the cats.

Privately, though, between you and me, I don’t understand why she’s so upset?  Didn’t he have her murdered that time?  Alright it didn’t take, and she came back, but he still had it done.  And she’s been injured lots of times.  She’s been _tortured_.  I have seen her scars, not all of them so pretty and faded as the little white slash at her cheekbone.

And he _didn’t know it was her_. 

He must have been so scared, trying to be dead and knowing Holmes probably wasn’t and Mycroft definitely had him all figured out.  And then there’s this mysterious somebody half a step behind you and you don’t even know who it is?  From parts of the conversation I don’t hear, I gather that she was on a roof, watching a building, watching a person she thought was associated with Mr Moriarty.  Someone went to find her while she was up there, and there was a chase.  And from a roof, Miss Mies slipped, and she fell into a narrow alley, fell straight down on that one poor leg.

I don’t hear her say it, obviously, but when she finally got home and saw a real doctor in England?  He told her the bones her leg were basically like the wafer inside a wrapper, and somebody had squeezed the whole biscuit in their fist. 

Which would be horrible whoever it happened to, but if Mr Moriarty had _known_ it was Miss Mies, I’m sure it wouldn’t have happened that way.  She should have just text him.  Surely all of this could have been avoided if she’d only left him a little voicemail some night, don’t you think?

Part of me, the part of me which is a little bit buzzy at the edges, the part of me that keeps having to bite in my lips to keep them pressed together, wants to defend him.  Lucky for me, there’s not only the sensible, restrained part of me fighting against it, but the really smart part too.  He probably doesn’t want me to jump in.  I could start shouting the odds if I want, but that wouldn’t help him, I don’t think.  I think he’d probably get annoyed at me for that.  Maybe he’s apologizing, not because he’s sorry, but because he knows she needs to be apologized to.  The truth could be getting thrown over just because he really wants her back. 

How beautiful.  How selfless.

Then some words come through to me clearly, “Dani, don’t make a mistake here.”

I know I’m not supposed to be listening, but how can I help but hear that?  I have to hear that.  That affects me directly.  I was alive, I was safe.  I had done the job.  Why am I thinking all of these things in past tense?  Oh, please, Miss Mies, don’t make a mistake here.  I am hugging her other cat very tightly with my eyes shut, with my head nuzzling down on top of his.  Please don’t make a mistake.  You could kill me.  Please don’t make a mistake.

I only got to ask about the Cass cat.  This one’s name is Kurgan.  Somewhere far away at the back of my mind, past drinks and panic where I cannot reach it, I know what that means, and I just get more and more scared. 

_Dani, don’t make a mistake here_.

I swear to God, I hear the squelch of her eyes rolling in their sockets.  “Don’t threaten me, James.  I never was afraid of you.”

“No.”  Not a refusal; he is agreeing with her.  In a distant, dreamy way, as if it’s never occurred to him before.  “No, you _weren’t_ , were you?”  As if he is surprised and baffled by this.  As if it is a revelation to him.  As if it is cause enough to back away and regroup, he stands up and reaches for his jacket.  “Alright then,” he says.  “C’mon, Angel.  I think we’re finished for the night.”

I immediately say goodbye to the cats and starts towards the door. 

Behind me, Miss Mies can’t get up, but she calls out, “Angel, stay.  Please.”

I told her before, I can’t.  I can’t leave him alone.  Especially if she isn’t coming back.  He wants her, and it’s not for any of the jobs she used to do for him.  All I can think of, the only other thing he ever used her for, she used to talk.  Sitting in the office or the kitchen, even when she was bollocking him or calling him stupid, she talked.  They understood each other.  They were on a level and I have tried, I have really, really tried, to help him get along without it.  I have been as much of Miss Mies as I know how, but it turns out I’m not good enough, and he was still willing to come here and lie, to humour her, and it hasn’t been enough.  How can I leave him now?  After a let-down like this, how can I? 

There is also, though I promise it isn’t important, not even to ridiculous me, the fact that my continuing, moment to moment, depends on whether or not I do as I’m told. 

“Angel, he won’t stop you if you decide to stay.”

Which would be fine, except there really isn’t a decision for me to make.


	12. Chapter 12

If I talk too much about my plaster cast, you’ll have to forgive me.  I know a lot of people have had them and probably find it all very boring.  But you have to remember, a lot of people happen, and they might get confused if I just went off on one and told you, _The cotton is full of staples_. 

My cast is also a large part of my life at the moment, since I can’t even brush my teeth properly, and you can fuck off if you’re going to be snide about it.

To explain, then, when they put plaster on your arm they can’t stick it straight on the skin.  That would be a bad idea and be a bit difficult to get off and do damage.  It would also be very uncomfortable.  So before they put it on they wrap your arm up in soft, fluffy cotton.  Which gets all grubby and ragged at the edges, but that’s the least of my worries, really.  Because last night, after me being the one to start that whole stupid argument with Miss Mies about Morocco when she decided she wasn’t coming back after all, I was obviously in trouble.  You can understand that.  Even me being a little bit tipsy last night, I could understand that.

I will say, though, that I do not accept _full_ responsibility for us having to walk away and leave her last night.  I only brought up something that would have come up eventually anyway.  If she felt that strongly about it, she probably wasn’t coming back anyway.  And if he’d just told me when I asked him it would never have happened.  If you’d know somebody for a good long while, and then you lost touch, and when you met them again this person who was always very physically strong and could do some very intricate things with her legs had lost the use of one of them, you’d want to know what happened.  I only did what was natural. 

Then again, I’m not supposed to be natural, am I?  Celestial me, remember?  Heavenly creature?

Short version, he opened his stapler in the office and tipped the bar inside out into his hand.  He then crushed it, which hurt him a bit, but it split all the staples up, and he grabbed my broken arm and funnelled them out of his fist down between cast and skin from both ends. 

The cotton is full of staples, alright?

What hurts more, though, is him not talking to me.  Not that he’s ignoring me.  He’s done that before and, though it’s tough, I have learned to live with it because he always ends up needing me for something.  No, it’s more like he’s gone away.  He’s somewhere inside himself.  And he is working at something.  Usually that would mean burying himself away in the office, would mean murmuring and pacing and me having to edge him out the door to get him to eat.  But it’s not that way.  He goes about it gently, methodically, like he used to in the old days.  Maybe there’s nothing he needs to think and argue about, with this job.

So I am waiting to do something I never ever do – sneak. 

Day one, first day he brought me home.  I was sick and weak and couldn’t believe my luck.  I wasn’t an angel yet.  I was a girl.  It was horrible, from what I remember.  But the only real rule when I got here, was not to go in the office unless I was wanted or necessary. 

But I have to know.  After last night, after her, after me, and what did Miss Mies mean when she said he wouldn’t stop me if I decided to stay with her?  I have to know.

So I hang about in the great wide room outside, which doesn’t get used much anymore now that he doesn’t gather those great important war-councils of all his friends.  McLeod is here, so I use him as an excuse.  We are playing with the feathery mouse he likes, though I’ve been thinking I should buy him a shiny fish like Miss Mies’ cats had.  He deserves it, putting up with me and the boss.

Speaking of him, he drifts out now.  Out past me without looking at me, calmly reading over a thin sheet of paper on his way to make a coffee. 

The second he’s in the kitchen out of sight I get up and slip into the office. 

There are more papers on the desk, same as the one he was carrying.  There is also a pair of thin gloves, which are still warm when I touch them, so I do not touch the paper with my bare fingerprints, even though they are prints that belong to nobody, mean nothing.  It means I can only read portions and angles of what is typed.

_Daniela Artura,_ one says.  Little cut off parts give an address in Seville, and a long series of digits that just happened to recognize as being the number of a nameless bank account.  Another sheet says _Maya Darcy_ and not only gives three similar codes but the full name and home address of a thief Miss Mies knows well called Bunny Manders.

There are lots of Misses Mieses here, if every sheet is a different version of her. 

I am counting Misses Mieses and I have run out of fingers when his shadow splits the light from the doorway.  My breath catches.  “I followed the cat in.  He run in when you come out and I came in to grab it, but he bolted.  I’m not snooping, it just caught my atten-“

“Hush,” he mutters.  “Ready for you anyway.”

His hand on my shoulder, he moves me gently away from his chair.  Even when he sits down, his hand stays with me.  Under his breath, “Never did scare her.”  He’s actually been saying that a lot.  Now that I hear it clearly it really hits me just how often.  He has been breathing those words in and out since she said them.  Now his hand grabs up from my shoulder, snatching my face by the chin, “Tell me, just out of interest, do I scare _you_?  Hm?  A chuisle, my little heartbeat, dear little one, do I?”

“Yes, sir,” I say, hoping it’s the right answer.  “Of course you do.”  His expression, it could either way, I could be onto a really good answer or an awful one, so I try to make it better, “That’s what love is, isn’t it?”

He lets go of me.  He doesn’t tell me if I’m right or wrong, but just goes about putting on his gloves again, and gathering the sheets on the table.  He brushes the possible prints of thumb and forefinger off the sheet he carried to the kitchen and back.  Then he puts them all inside a cardboard folder, and that inside a plastic cover, and passes it to me.  I hold back at first, my hands raised to take it but not grabbing. 

“Don’t I need gloves too?”

“No.  And don’t dare put any on.  Come back here with warm hands and you’ll have something to be scared of.”

“Yes, sir.  Where am I going, please?”

“Just a quick little run.  Piece of piss to a seasoned professional such as yourself.”  Still mocking me.  Still not happy with me.  I told you he’d only speak to me if he needed me for something.  He shows me a map on his computer.  It’s not of anything in particular.  It’s just some streets and a particular crossroads with lots of traffic lights.  He instructs me to cross from one particular corner to another particular corner, and not to bat a lash when someone crossing in the other direction takes the folder from under my arm.

“Who will that be?”

“Heaven only knows.  Ask them, angel, you’ve got connections up there.”

“I just meant, like, an organization or what they do or-“

With the slightest smile and without the slightest modulation of his voice, “Ask one more question, Fiona.”

“Sorry, sir,” and I take the folder from him. 

He follows me to the door, with other sparks of instruction.  No public transport, walk, don’t put the folder in my bag, don’t acknowledge the person I meet.  There’s quite a list, but I miss most of them.  I am thinking primarily of all the Misses Mieses, and who I’m going to be giving them to.  It’s nobody good, is it?  I can’t think of anybody good it might even remotely possibly maybe be, so it’s nobody good. 

At the front door, I stop to put my trainers on.  As I lift one towards me, something inside glitters.  I tilt it towards the light, expecting to see a stray staple, or a strange stone brought in from outside maybe.  But when the shoe is tilted, more glitter rattles down from the far side of the arch towards the heel.  On closer inspection, they are tiny little nuggets of ground down glass.  You know the stuff.  When you break the heavy base of a bottle.  Like a wine bottle, maybe, shattered inside a cloth, and all the shatters rumbled around until they don’t have points or corners. 

I glance down and the other shoe is the same.

I put them on anyway.  What else can I do?  Mr Moriarty watches me with the first flicker of anything like approval I’ve seen all day.  What else can I do?  He puts his arm around me when I stand up into them.  He gets the door for me while my breath is trapped deep down inside so I can’t cry out.  “Mind how you go,” he mutters, softly, his mouth turned to the side of my head like a kiss. 

I say, “Yes, sir.”  What else should I say?  I say it and I leave.

I do not like Miss Mies.

On my way downstairs, because I don’t know if the lift counts as public transport – it is after all a box where you’re trapped travelling with other people – my head gets to spinning with the twists of the flights and landings, and my mind inside it winds around the fact that I do not like Miss Mies.  She is a low, slimy, animal sort of a person.  She might be all rich and posh and cultured, but the things that make her happiest are basic and dirty.  And she is the centre of her own world, which baffles me and disgusts me more than anything, when I don’t even have a world of my own.  If I am an angel, then, that makes her quite the opposite, doesn’t it?  I don’t like her.  I don’t like her as a person. 

Normally I wouldn’t admit that.  Even though she’s not technically in the organization at the moment, she will be soon because he wants her.  She is, therefore, still what the Colonel would call my superior officer. 

It’s just really easy to admit how much you hate somebody when you can feel your feet slipping inside your shoes because they are bleeding.

In the lobby, I take my phone out of my coat.  Then I decide it’s not a good idea.  If he can track where it is, heaven only knows what else he can do with it and the calls on it.  I put it away again.

All down the streets on the way to the river, I feel through my various pockets and find all the twenty-pence pieces I have.  There’s time to find lots of them, because I can only walk very slowly.  I try walking on the front of my foot, or back on my heel, no matter how stupid it might look, but nothing helps.

On the bridge, though I haven’t really got time, I stop halfway and look at the water.  It’s an excuse, you see, to hang my folded arms on the rail and lean forward, and my feet leave the ground, blissful relief except I can feel warm liquid running down and dripping off my toes.  It would be very easy to lose my grip on the folder right now.  I’ll just say it had it tucked under my bad arm and somebody shoved past me.  Or I won’t say anything at all.  That’s probably more like it.  How could I ever, ever go back, really?  He’d kill me.  Actually, even if I did run, or did something stupid like Miss Mies’ plan with the passport and Paris and Australia, he’d very likely still find me and kill me.  Not because he’s hate me, not because I’d have blown a huge big job for him, but just to prove to me and everybody, you can’t do that.  You don’t make the decisions.  He does. 

You know that one about dancing with a gorilla or a bear or whatever?  Yeah. 

Of course, I don’t have to lose just the folder over the bridge.  Or under a train or off a tall building (though I’ve heard that last one doesn’t always work.)  What I mean is, we could lose me and all.  Me hanging like this on the rail, somebody might bump into me, or I might overbalance, or I might just giggle and do a forward roll.  What I mean is – Well, you know what I mean.

Obviously I don’t do any of that.  He needs me, doesn’t he?  If he didn’t need me I would have stayed with Miss Mies last night, honest I would have.

So I move along off the bridge.  Not far from there, there’s a phone box.  Safer than my mobile, this is what all the twenty-pence coins were for.  I put in three to get started.  It rings and rings and rings while I imagine Miss Mies studying an unknown number, fearing it.  I will her to answer anyway and, like I was magic, the line connects.

There’s no hello, just silence and the sense of her being there.  “Hello?”

“Angel,” she sighs.  “Oh, I was so worried.  Where are you calling from?”

“I’m in a phone box across the river from Vauxhall.  I don’t have long.”  As quick and clear as I can, I tell her about the folder.  It comes out of me in loose words and broken sentences, tumbling, I’m making a balls of explaining anything, but she seems to understand. 

“Open it.  Is there time?  If there isn’t, go, take care of yourself.”

“No, I… I can h… What do you need?”

“The names, my names.  My guess is he’s left me _one_ I can hide in.”

I take the card out of the plastic and hold it braced against me, flipping through the top edges of the sheets.  I can’t believe I’m doing this.  I don’t know _why_ I’m doing this.  She’s just said it herself, she can run.  She’s clever and connected enough.  She’s got the money to do it properly.  I get very scared when I realize, standing here reading her names probably isn’t much different to flinging myself in the Thames.

“Darcy Arthur,” I say nonetheless.  Between names I slip one of my trainers off with the toe of the other.  Surely it’s not cheating if I only take out one foot at a time?  Inside the shoe is red.  “Danielle Darcy.  Daniel Myson… Miss Mies?” 

“Never mind about that now.”  I can’t tell you how calm she sounds.  Not enough to spread to me, but enough so that I can feel it.  Calm feels warm and soft, safe.  I think her voice might be the only thing that keeps me from crying.  “Tell me, love,” she says, and yes, yes, I’ll tell her, “Do any of those pages refer to Lady Danielle Severine Mies, or to Elworth House?”

I take another flutter through the pages to be sure.  She is perfectly patient until I confirm, “No, none of them.”

“Then I know what he’s doing.  Thank you, Angel.  I know what this costs you and it means a great deal to me.”

“I still have to deliver the file.”

“I know you do, love.  Not least because the people who are expecting to take it from you get very dangerous when they’re disappointed.  Run along, now.”

She starts to go away from the phone and I start to hang up.  Then, quick as I can, “Miss Mies?”

“…Yes?”

“I’m very sorry for your loss.”

“I told you last night, that wasn’t your fault.”

“What?  Oh, no, not Mr Benson.  Your mum.  I mean, if you’re Lady Mies now-“

“Oh.  Thank you, Angel.  Now go.”

And I think she must have to go too, because she hangs right up this time.  She’s probably got plans to make.  I make sure to remember the full name she gave me and _Elworth House_ too.  The other thing I do is leave behind the change that drops down out of the payphone.  I always liked that, when I was on the street.  You can pick up some decent silver if you hang around near a phone box.


	13. Chapter 13

Two days since the folder slipped away from me in the crossing crowd at traffic lights, I’m beginning to think it might not all be so bad.  Certainly they haven’t gotten her.  I text her the first night, just to see if she was alright, and she text straight back, right away.  It said, _Come along with me, Angel_ , and I said back, _Can’t come out tonight, sorry_.

Then she must have spoken to Colonel Moran.  He arrived here yesterday morning.  Sometimes he does that.  Now that he doesn’t have his silly day-job anymore, and Tom still thinks he does, he has trouble burning up those first earliest hours.  Yesterday, however, he came with real purpose.  He came charging in the door.  I was still in the shower so I didn’t see it, but I heard him, heard him raging, “Our Dani?”  Mr Moriarty said something very low and calm, probably with a piece of toast in his mouth, so I didn’t hear.  The answer was, “Shut up with that shite.  She’s your fucking _sister_ , mate, only you _talk_ to our Dani, so-“

And I believe what Mr Moriarty said then was, “Only if she wants to talk to me.”

I wish the Colonel had called ahead.  I could have told him it was useless.  There really is no talking to him at the minute.  Mr Moriarty has got the idea in his head, and he’s got the plan to go with it.  There is only one person who can stop him when he’s gotten this far and guess what?  She’s not here.  Besides which, it was already done.  The information was passed on.  Events are out of the boss’s hands, in a way.  Which is uncharacteristic and worrying and more worrying as I keep thinking about who that file could possibly have gone to, but it was done.  What was the point in shouting and arguing?

Colonel Moran kept calling her ‘Our Dani’, like some kind of joint project between them.  I know that’s not it, I know it’s because he’s from the North and it’s a way they phrase things to mean family or close friends.  But the repeating of it, it sounded like he should have been consulted, like they have joint ownership.  I crept out of the bathroom and into my room.  It shares a wall with the kitchen and I put my ear to it.  The Colone was asking, “Have you seen her?” and the meaning was clear – she’s a cripple, she’s useless.  What could Mr Moriarty even want with her, and even if she did refuse, how dare her burn her all up when she’s already so weak and defenceless?  Mr Moriarty said, “Yes,” then turned the tap on at the sink so all I could hear was the rush of water. 

So I tried to get in there?  I thought if I went in and turned on the kettle they’d let me make the coffee?  Either I’d hear their conversation or they’d stop shouting with me in the room.  I was okay with either. 

But when I walked in, when the Colonel’s eyes landed on me, I immediately said, “It wasn’t my fault.”

“I know that, Scout.  It’s a bit beyond you, all this.”

He started to smile, so I did too, and agreed, “Wouldn’t know where to start.”

Mr Moriarty cut in, “Et tu, Lavinia?” and sent me out for shopping, so I missed the rest.

I text Miss Mies that night too.  She said she was fine and asked if I could cat-sit for a while.  She said it would only be a week or so. 

Texts me, _u’ll b back that soon?_

Texts her back, _No.  I’ll send someone to get them_.

She’s been texting Uncle Charlie too.  That was last _night’s_ visit, albeit over the phone.  It was much more understandable.  To begin with, he is still in Florida, winding up his business concerns so he can come back.  He didn’t have all the details like the Colonel did.  For another, he hates Miss Mies.  He was the one who taught me to call her the Bitch.  I love my Uncle Charlie very much, because he is quite predictable.  I knew when I heard it was him on the phone that he wasn’t calling about ‘Our Dani’ or to plead with the boss to help her or forgive her or anything stupid like that.  If Uncle Charlie called, it was just to check the same awful fate wasn’t waiting for _him_ , should he put a foot wrong.  My Uncle Charlie Milverton is very good at self-preservation, you know.

But then again, it did go on for an awful long time, that conversation, and Mr Moriarty did see fit to put two closed doors between him and me, and I still heard parts of it, it got so loud.

“Oh, that was _you_ , was it?  You’re the genie that spirited her home from the desert?”  Uncle Charlie answered and Mr Moriarty mimicked his voice, “Oh, well, you arranged for it, yes, of course.  Heavens forfend I accuse you of actually doing anything.”

Uncle Charlie sends Miss Mies better painkillers than she can get in this country.  He has them smuggled in.  Actually, now that I think about it, I heard an awful lot of that conversation they had.  But Uncle Charlie hates Miss Mies, so it’s all alright.  They must have talked about stuff too, because it went on so long I fell asleep on the sofa. 

That’s where I waken on the morning of the third day, a little cold except where McLeod has buried himself against my chest. 

The first thing I do is get up and check the dressings on my feet.  This is the first morning I have found the padding completely dry, without seeping or spotting.  That’s good.  Maybe things really are looking up; if I’m not bleeding and Miss Mies is still free and alive, they must be.

I’ve been awake only minutes when Mr Moriarty comes in.  He’s bringing me tea.  How kind of him, though I must admit, I have been utterly forgiven for starting the barney at Miss Mies’ flat ever since I got back from delivering the dossier.  He was nothing but charming, whether I deserved it or not.  I limped up to the door and I was fumbling around with the key, but he came and got me.  Leaning on him, those steps coming inside were the least painful I’d taken.  He sat me down and took off my shoes, which were turning pink even on the outside by then, and cleaned all the blood and little flecks of glass away.  He bound them up all pillowy inside and tight around them, so they became almost comfortable.  And I have had nothing to do.  Back on the sofa, me and my cat and my bad TV. 

You know, my boss is very patient with wounds.  You wouldn’t think it.  He doesn’t much like to be touched, actually.  But I think I must be different or not count.  When he was giving me my wings, for example, that was months of cutting and peeling and bandage and blood. 

He comes in now, puts my feet in his lap, and checks what I just checked.  He’s pleased too.  “Have you been up on them this morning?”

“I just woke up.”  So he puts my feet on the floor, gives me his hand for support so I can walk back and forth.  “Yeah, much better.  Just a bit uncomfortable.”

“Well, that’s to be expected.”  With me sitting next to him, with his arm tight around my shoulders, “And what have you learned?”

Oh, I’ve been waiting for this question.  I’ve got a clever answer for once.  Not smart-arsed or glib, just clever.  I’ve got one I think he’ll like.  “Nothing I didn’t already know.  I’m sorry I got so weak.  Thanks for helping me get better, I know you don’t have to.”

Nearly laughing, “You’re watching too much Judge Judy in here, my girl.”

“I like Steve Wilkos actually, he just shouts.”

He seems tired, but still smiling.  In a better mood, in fact, than he’s been in since the funeral.  It makes him very warm and understanding.  He likes me right now; I can feel it when he hugs me.  We stay like that a while.  I feel like he’s getting his words in order before he says them.  Me, I can just enjoy the quiet for a little bit, and I pick a couple of the bigger scabs off the soles of my feet. 

But ultimately he takes a deep breath.  I straighten up to dutifully listen.

“Our own Lady Mies,” he says, and there’s that ‘Our’ again, that too-familiar belonging when the bitch has caused all this trouble and I want _nothing_ to do with her, “has taken herself off up the country.”

“Elworth House…”

He flinches.  “Where’d you hear that?”

“It’s the family place, isn’t it?  Was her dad’s and then her mum’s and now… Now she’s Lady Mies.”

“Clever Angel…  Anyway, that’s where she’s gone.  Big, old, drafty, empty house with too many rooms and too much baggage, and I’m fairly certain nobody ever had a stair-lift installed.”

I interrupt, “ _Little_ bit cruel, sir.”

“But true.  I’m making the point, sweet Susannah, that she’s all alone in a place she doesn’t like and which does not suit her.  Now, what should we do for a friend in such awful straits?”

Leave her alone.  Not burn her out in the first place.  Not trap her in such awful straits with no escape and none of her hundred other identities to hide in anymore.  Leave her alone.  Let her get on with it.  Send her a new passport, a bunch of flowers and an apology.  Unfreeze her bank accounts.  He’s playing with his phone while he’s talking to me and, on one of the newsfeeds, I see that Bunny Manders got arrested this morning.  Leave her alone.  Just let her be okay.  Forgive her for not liking you anymore.  Forgive her for not forgiving you.  Buy her really good painkillers and a bungalow on a flat street somewhere warm and charming.  Leave her alone.

“Go and visit, make sure she’s alright?  Bring her a housewarming present?”

“Fancy a little trip out of the city, do you?”

“Of course, sir.”


	14. Chapter 14

The Manor Mies is very big, but not especially beautiful.  Please don’t mistake me; I’m sure architecturally it is as much of a marvel as any elegant country home.  It’s built out of great huge blocks of gold-coloured sandstone which, on a sunny afternoon when there was rain this morning, gives a soft glow.  It’s also well-kept; fresh paint on the door and window frames, the hedges around it all neat and trimmed.  There’s nothing about it not to like. 

I couldn’t tell you, exactly, what it is about Elworth House that puts me off. 

It’s got something to do with how I feel right at this moment.  Right at this moment, we have had a nice drive up, the boss and I.  With the radio on and the changing weather, there have been times I almost forgot where we’re going and why.  He’s been talking to me.  Not little clips like he does at home, or barking orders, or just talking and I’m only supposed to nod and understand and learn as many lessons as he wants to teach me.  We’re really talking.  About nothing, but I get to talk back, and I think he’s actually paying attention.  Then again, he doesn’t like driving, so I’m probably just a distraction.  But with overnight bags in the back, I have felt for a couple of hours like maybe we’re family and we’re off visiting for the weekend.  It’s been lovely.

Something about the house in front of me stops me feeling that.  Something about it puts a pin in the big swollen happy bubble we had made inside the car.  I don’t know if that makes any sense. 

Haunted houses in films are shot so they make you feel this way the first time they are onscreen. 

“I don’t see her car,” I tell him.

“She can’t drive herself anyway.  Someone must have brought her.  Charlie’s been doing an awful lot, from afar, I’d bet he arranged it.”

But I didn’t really mean just her car, though.  I mean I just don’t feel like anybody’s here.  Or, actually, like they have been for a long time.  I know he has ways of knowing she came here just the morning, and if somebody had to bring her somebody would have had to take her away, and he would know about that too.  I’m not questioning that.  There’s no explanation, it’s just a knot in my belly.  You can’t see this house or you’d understand.  Nobody’s here.  Nobody happy has been here for a long time.

Mr Moriarty gets out of the car, and I follow suit. 

Up the paved drive, there is moss in the cracks.  I’m not the only one who doesn’t like this house, y’know.  All the stuff that’s right about it, the upkeep and gardening, you can organize that from a distance.  You know a house needs that stuff.  Every old house needs that stuff.  Stuff like the moss, though, you wouldn’t think of that unless you saw it, would you?

“Boss, this place is horrible.”

“It’s a country pile, dear, one’s much the same as another.”

Not on the telly, they aren’t.  Granted, Elworth House isn’t so big or busy as Downton, and it’s not like we’re in that whole Upstairs-Downstairs era anymore.  But the front step is cracked.  It wobbles to the left when I stand by his shoulder. 

Mr Moriarty is looking for a bell or a knocker, but where I am I can see that the door is not fully closed.  It is, however, huge, so when I stretch out a hand and push, nothing happens.  It takes all of me to get it to open, leaning on the handle against the weight of all that wood and the squeaking, disused hinges. 

“Seriously –“ I start, but he shushes me.  Apparently we’re not talking anymore, or not the way they were.

“Dani!” he calls from the hallway.  Softer, to me, “She’ll have hidden herself away when she heard the car.  Help me.  I’ll buy you new skates if you find her first.”

As we part either side of the enormous staircase, I tell him, “Nah, you’re alright.”

“Ground floor only, don’t you think?”  That’s the last thing he says before I’m out of talking distance.  Anything he shouts is meant for her.  “Oi!  Lady Mies!  Don’t worry, it’s only me.  And the Angel, too, she’s with me.  Alive,” he says, with a smile, trailing away.  “Safe,” and he’s almost laughing.  “Well,” he says.

Softer, because he thinks I’m too far away, “For now.”  But I’m just on the other side of a wall.  There was a sideboard, all dusty, with a bronze on it, a tall bird like a heron holding a stone up in one claw.  It was interesting, I felt like it meant something.  So I’m close enough and I hear him say that.  He has no way of knowing that.  I wish he did.  I want to know if he’d still say it. 

In case she’s here listening, I call out, “Miss Mies?”

“See?  Told you she was alright.  Come on out, love, we’ll end up talking eventually.”

I leave the bronze bird behind me and walk on.  I know I should be going very quickly room to room.  Miss Mies is not hard to spot.  She doesn’t fit in narrow cupboards anymore, she can’t ball up and hide under a table and besides, she’s not afraid of him, remember?  Wherever she is she’s probably sitting waiting.  She could be asleep with boredom, no clue we’re here.  She could be dead drunk.  That’s where I’d put my money. 

But I keep getting stopped by details.  For instance, notches nicked pale out of a mahogany doorframe, the spacing of them obviously measuring the growth of a child.  Or cat claws marking a parquet floor, but there’s no cat here now, and they’ve been waxed over and buffed out a dozen times since they were fresh. 

I open a door, thinking it’ll lead somewhere.  It shows a small, windowless room, like storage, and for whatever reason it is full of bulk orders from a shopping channel.  Twenty packs of vacuum bags, fifty Easter card-making kits, a bag of soft, orange practice footballs.  Whether or not I understand it, it makes me want to cry, and Miss Mies isn’t in there, so I shut the door.

I really hate this house.  I really want to leave.  This could be where I die, you know.  Not because he’s going to kill me if we don’t get her back, just spontaneously.  Just because this is a place where people have died and where they ought to die.  I’m going to snuff it anyway, aren’t I?  Might as well be in a place that suits.

This house is making me have thoughts like that.

Somewhere far behind me, Mr Moriarty is still calling out, still talking to her.  “You’re alright, you know.  Dani, there are other thieves.  There are other… Mata Haris, whatever you liked to call that other work of yours.  And nobody, not you, me or anybody, needs to convince or pander to any other so-called bosses anymore.  I don’t need you to do any of that old stuff.  I need my bitch back, that’s all.”

He doesn’t know it, but I’ve come out a door and I’m right behind him.  I hang like ghost in his shadow.  Next time he shouts he’s so loud with the closeness I freeze so I won’t jump and betray myself. 

“You’re the only one, y’know.  I promised myself I’d never tell you this, Dani, I hope you’ve blacked out somewhere and you don’t hear it, but after about a year of death I bought a pack of cigarettes and I…  Fuck off.”

On the tips of my toes, even though that pressure burns in all my little cuts, I back away from him, slipping silent until I find my back against a door which is not so carefully polished dark.  I look down and there’s a little yellow light seeping out from underneath.

So I make big stepping noises on the spot, so he’ll think I just walked out here.  “Sir?”  He spins, genuinely caught, really surprised.  Gracious Angel-me, I pretend I’ve never heard a word from his lips.  “There’s a light…”

When I pull the door, there is a tiny, bare wood stairwell hooking up to some little room out of sight.

He dismisses me.  “It’s not dark outside yet.  Last of sunset, that’s all.”  Then he yells, “Dani!” and starts walking again.  He doesn’t stop me climbing the stairs.

He’s right, of course.  When isn’t he?  Even if it _was_ dark now, Miss Mies was here first thing.  She wouldn’t have needed any lights on.  And these stairs are very narrow, especially at the corner.  I’m having a little trouble keeping my feet straight and both my knees bend properly.  There must be a sensible explanation for the light.  But I follow.  Obviously I do.  I’m stupid.  Like moths are, that go to light even when it electrocutes them and keep doing it over and over again, and who watch their mates fall dead off that light and still think maybe they’ll be different if they only try.  Yeah, that’s me.  Moth-me.  Angel-moth-me.

Angel-moth-me finds out, the moment I turn that corner, that I am not wrong.  There _is_ a light.  A single bare bulb in a small room above. 

Don’t ask me why, but I get very slow and careful, and I look down at my ankles in case they are pulling on wires already. 

But the room at the top of the stairs isn’t booby-trapped, just abandoned.  It’s very pretty.  If I ever had a real place for me, just my own, I think some part of it would look like this.  There are three rugs, none of them the shape, colour or pattern of the other two.  One wall is all pictures out of magazines, peeling and faded but still absolutely of David Bowie, Noel Gallagher, Morrissey, and post-its and bits of headline and postcards and concert tickets.  There are a lot of books and diaries around, CDs, a stack of records on top of an old player for them.

An empty birdcage.  Ragged and forgotten in the middle of the floor, a cat’s crochet mouse-toy.

I could spent hours here, getting to know whoever’s special hiding place this used to be.  If I had hours; the words are all muffled and mangled up here, but I can still hear the boss shouting for her, still looking.  Doors open and close underneath me.

Besides, the bare bulb burns over a little table.  It has been dragged there especially for the occasion; you can tell by the tracks in the dust on the rug. 

On the table, there is a gun.  Bright silver nickle, and the handle white enamel, bright and tacky with a painted Virgin Mary, except she’s got a skull on her face and she’s holding a scythe.  There’s a note too, folded in half so it stands up next to it.  I hate Miss Mies very much, but she does have beautiful, flowing handwriting.  I will give her that.  It suits her.  I hear her voice in my head reading, “Don’t worry about the first shot.  It doesn’t count.  You will miss.  He will be too shocked to do anything.  He will try to talk to you.  That’s when you do it properly.”

Four lines down the page, I realize what she’s saying and look away.  I hold the note to my chest where I won’t be able to read it, and my other hand covers my mouth to stop me screaming.

There’s more written.  I force myself to face it.  “Though I’m hoping you’ve lived through enough to know this must be done, I realize you might still feel you can’t do this.  Were I there, I would tell you with great feeling, Angel, you owe Jim nothing.  But I doubt you’ll believe words on a page.”

I’ll give her that too.  She got that very right.  Her handwriting and her incapacity to influence my loyalties in any way, Miss Mies can have both of those. 

“So I have made plans of my own.  If you can’t put the gun to good use, I only ask that you stay in this room.  It is the safest part of the house, and the farthest from what is about to happen.”

There’s more, about good luck and get out and wake up, but the note is on the floor.  I’m down the stairs, two at a time until I stumble and fall into the corner, rolling to fall again into the doorframe, falling into the hall and _bolting_ the last direction I saw him disappear in, “Boss!”, screaming for him, “Please, sir!”, throwing doors open, “Don’t touch anything!”

I hear or sense something round a corner, don’t ask me what just that he’s there, and fling myself around just as he’s coming to find me.  “What’re you bawling about?” but I’m past him already, slamming shut the door even as he comes out through it.  “Christ, calm _down_.  What ha-“ And it happens even as he’s trying to ask – the door is flung out into the hallway, barrelling me into him and both of us to the floor.  I hear the boom long after, so huge it consumes that whole space he was standing in only a minute ago, disappearing it all into a black hole.  Through the hole the door left, there’s only smoke, and the first glowing edges of a fire starting up around a charred, gaping chasm sucking everything out into nothing.

Picking himself up from the floor, Mr Moriarty strokes my hair.  Past the ringing in my ears I hear nothing.  But I feel the shape of words I know pop on my eardrum, dimly mumbled, “Clever Angel…”


	15. Chapter 15

An _explosion_.  A _bomb_ , a real one, like Mr Shikra makes.  A bomb went off and Mr Moriarty was standing right there, except that I called him.  I feel made out of points and weird angles getting up off the floor, like I’m broken, like all my joints are just places that shattered ends jam against each other.  That’s when I realize I’m trying to use my cast to push myself up.  That’s why the joint won’t open up, it’s immobilized.  Shifting to the other arm is too much of a difference.  I just fall on my back again.

I can’t hear a thing except a pulse, like a noiseless siren spinning pressure past my ears.  It’s my heartbeat.  On some level I know that. 

Mr Moriarty, how he got flung down, I’m lying on his arm.  I don’t realize this until he too tries to get up and I feel his elbow bend up beneath me.  He fell face down, and doesn’t have a broken arm, so he’s doing much better at it than I was.  I roll away from him and feel the door jolt around over my shifting legs.  The weight of it is pinning my aching feet down.  Whether or not that’s got anything to do with the fact that can feel every slash and prickle on the soles of them, I don’t know.  I don’t know much, except that my own voice keeps saying, “An _explosion_ , oh Boss, but an actual real-life, ooh, _explosion_.” 

My voice is inside my head.  I could be talking out loud but none of us would know.

I see him from the corner of my eye, pushed up over his arms, blinking off the shock.  That’s when I start trying to sit again.  Because I _have_ to.  Because he _needs_ me.  Because he gets stuck, when something unexpected happens.  His life is arranged so that nothing unexpected happens.  He hates even the mildest surprise.  Even if I make dinner some night, he’ll be all put out because he had planned his evening around making dinner.  Which is all just trickle-down from his work, which this is, where nothing unexpected should ever, ever happen.  He needs me.

“Sir,” and I grab out for him, my grasping hand finding a bit of his sleeve, “It’s okay.”

And you know what he does?  Even though he’s obviously distressed and he’s the one who needs my help?  He actually helps to move me?  He moves me closer to him until I’m free from under the door.  He asks me to wiggle my feet and seems relieved when I can.  He stays close, his face over mine, asking questions I can’t hear, but I try to lip read.  Making no progress, the only one I get right is when he holds up three fingers.  That one I know.  I both mimic the gesture and move my lips to say it.  That, at least, seems to satisfy him. 

That’s great.  I’m the last thing he should be worried about.

Now, however, he starts to make the next move – past sitting up, right to his feet.  And he’s leaving me on the floor, so I really need to get a shift on, don’t I?  Remember how he managed it, I roll onto my belly, and push with my good arm. 

My good arm alone is not enough.  It goes out from underneath me and leaves me flat on my face.  It’s okay.  I might just stay like this for a bit, if it’s all the same, if nobody cares.

I’m starting to hear a sort of roaring, though, like the wind in a storm.  Even if it’s just the blood in my veins, it’s real, genuine sound, not just the impression of it.  I’m becoming aware of the crackling, all the little pops and mutters in the air, of things burning, and I remember how I saw things glowing with fire just before everything became this strange and confusing.  There was clarity, wasn’t there?  Before I sank down like this, there was a second where everything was very immediate and pristine.  I was so stupid, why didn’t I cling onto that?

Mr Moriarty manages to get up, then reaches down to help me.  I hear, I think, “Come on,” as if I wouldn’t follow him anyway. 

I look back, you know.  It’s a horrible habit I have.  I always have to look and see what I’m running away from.  The smoke is clearing a bit.  It blew a big hole in the floor, her bomb did.  There are bits of a table and some glass lying around.  Which is an easy trap, when somebody is coming to talk to you.  A table and two drinks, like you’re expecting them. And he would have been standing right by it, wouldn’t he?  And the big hole, it’s in the floor.  Part of me, very far away past a lot of perplexing echoes, is making a connection between the big hole being in the floor and the fact that he would have been standing right on top of it.  I’m drawing conclusions except that I can’t really get at them, like they’re in a shop window; you think you know how they fit, but you never really know until you try them on, do you?

We leave.  I like to think I’m helping him as much as he’s helping me.  Like, the _door_ didn’t fall on the Boss, so he can walk better than I can, but I can remember the way better.  I am the one – I _think_ – who points us towards the big front door.

This time, when the stone step wobbles to the left, I fall off it.  And because he has been holding my arm, half-leaning and half-guiding, he staggers with me.  His hand grabs suddenly tight and holds me up from the ground.  Lest I dash my foot against a stone, isn’t that how the verse goes?  I shall tread upon the lion and the adder…

Because he hath set his love upon me…

I don’t know if I black out or it’s just that a lot of time passes very quickly.  I’m aware of being put in the back-seat of the car, curling myself against the bags we now have no use for.  Sound creeps in again.  Really, it could be ten minutes or ten thousand.  And I promise you, if everything remained easy and known, I would stay far away like I am.  If I only heard engine noise and radio music, I’d be fine.  Even sirens, I could handle sirens.

But the next thing I hear is Miss Mies’ voice.  I go back, like a trauma victim, to _I realize you might still feel like you can’t do this_ and snap to life, seized and shaking, _Bitch_.

Miss Mies, though, is only saying, “Hello?”  She sounds very small and distant.  I think that’s fear, though, not my tinnitus.

Mr Moriarty says, “Dani, darling!  Light of my life, sunrise of my fecking soul, forgive me calling, but two nos and a bomb is still a maybe.  Where the _fuck_ are you?”

And it’s as if she shakes herself.  Knowing who she’s talking to, she strengthens, gets loud and vicious and forceful.  Which is one reaction, I suppose, if you’ve just tried to bump somebody off.  If you don’t fancy being soft and weak and apologizing like mad, it’s probably the best reaction, actually.  All hard and nasty, “Your place.”  In harsh, sharp snaps, she explains what she’s been up to.  I get enough of the pieces to fill in the rest.    

Miss Mies, it seems, knew exactly what the plan was.  Mr Moriarty left her with only her real name and her real home.  He believed, then, that Lady Mies had only one safe place to hide.  But the trick is, she saw him coming.  So as best as I can put it together, she had herself driven up here very briefly today.  She or somebody with her (I am not built for detail right now, you can piss right off) set the bomb, and Miss Mies definitely set the upstairs room with the gun for me. 

But after that, she left again.  That’s the bad part.  That’s where it deviates from Mr Moriarty’s plan. 

We were on our way up here, we were coming visiting for the weekend?  And Miss Mies was down in London, down in our flat, where we live, using his computers and connections to arrange a new set of identities for herself.  Opening up some of her bank accounts he’d locked up tight.  Getting herself a passport arranged. 

Isn’t that clever?  It is so clever, in fact, that I panic, because he doesn’t like people being too clever, y’know.  Unless you’ve got a very specific surname beginning with H, you don’t get to be clever, because if you’re not one of them then you are obviously not clever enough.

But Miss Mies, it seems, has made it.  She’s crossed the threshold.  Mr Moriarty listens patiently, with a growing smile, while she explains what she’s been doing all day.  Me, meantime, I’m sitting up, trying to catch her word for word.  “…Short version, James, if you want me, I’ll be in Morocco.”

His grin splits into a loud, sudden laugh.  I know it’s not even fake because he takes both hands off the steering wheel and we veer over the centre line while he applauds her.  “Love it!  Love everything about it!”

And he, sounding all gentle and flattered, “Oh, well, thank you, darling, it’s nice to be appreciated.  I don’t get a lot of that these days.”

“That’s why you should have stayed with me.  I might not always have shown it but-“

“No, you didn’t.”

“But you were always appreciated, Lady Mies.  By the way, trying to blow my legs off, that was a touch.  Oh, that was a fucking beautiful touch.  Don’t think that escaped me just because of the explosion and the distraction, I got that, and it’s beautiful.”

“Thank you.”

I must still be deaf, or at least confused; they both sound _happy_ about all this.  Then, even as I’m listening, Mr Moriarty says, “Alright, provided you’re gone before we get back, I won’t reverse-engineer all the work you’ve done for yourself.  Use the service lift going down; the Angel says the proper one keeps sticking at Five.”

She’s free to go.

You’ll have to forgive me if I’m a bit slow on the uptake.  Penny, we kidnapped her sister.  The Colonel, we threatened his nice little domestic life he’d built.  Don’t start me on what we did to Uncle Charlie, or any of a dozen others.  And he’s telling Miss Mies what lift to use.  I must have missed some conversation before I woke up.  I’ve missed something, because this makes no sense.

“Sir?” I mutter.

But he gestures for me to be quiet; she is saying, “I appreciate that.  I’ll be out of your hair soon enough.”

“Stay that way.  Meet with… _anybody else_ again and all bets are off.”

“Understood.  Oh, and while we’re agreeing terms and conditions-“  That _voice_ of hers… It gives me shivers.  She sounds like she should be reading all sorts of terms and conditions in a lawyer’s office.  “-That child sitting next to you.”

That’s me.  I’m the child.  Even if I wasn’t the only other person in the car, I’d know by the glance the boss throws at me.  Like the Bitch was here and he was just confirming, telling her he knew what was she meant.  I am the child.  Me, the Angel, my I.D. says twenty-two, and I totally pass for it, I _never_ get asked for a licence or whatever when I buy wine for the flat, apparently ageless-timeless-celestial me, I’m the child.

But Mr Moriarty, getting it completely and not questioning it, “What about her?”

“Should anything unfortunate befall her, I personally will-?”

“You personally will _what_?”he laughs, “This was always our trouble, love; I’m not scared of you either.”

With that, he hangs up before she can speak. 

Can I tell you something?  It probably doesn’t count.  Me not being a real person, me being only the creature he made of me, I hardly think I count.  But if I did, and if you wanted to note my feelings for the record?  What you might say is that I am scared.  He’s not scared of her nor she of him.  But in between them is me. 

And, honestly?  I think I’m scared enough for the both of them.


End file.
